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From kafkatrap to honeytrap

The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.

IRC conversation, portions redacted to protect my informant, follows.

15:17:58 XXXXXXXXXXXX | I'm super careful about honey traps. For a
| while, that's how the Ada Initiative was
| trying to pre-generate outrage and collect
| scalps.
15:18:12 esr | REALLY?
15:18:22 esr | That's perverse.
15:18:42 XXXXXXXXXXXX | Yeah, because the upshot is, I no longer
| can afford to mentor women who are already
| in tech.
15:18:54 esr | Right.
15:19:01 XXXXXXXXXXXX | I can and do mentor ones who are not in
| it, but are interested and able
15:19:21 XXXXXXXXXXXX | but once one is already in... nope
15:20:08 XXXXXXXXXXXX | The MO was to get alone with the target,
| and then immediately after cry "attempted
| sexual assault".
15:23:27 esr | When the backlash comes it's going to be
| vicious. And women who were not part of
| this bullshit will suffer for it.
15:23:41 XXXXXXXXXXXX | I can only hope.
15:25:21 esr | Ah. On the "Pour encourager les autres"
| principle? I hadn't thought of that.
| Still damned unfortunate, though.
15:26:40 XXXXXXXXXXXX | Linus is never alone at any conference.
| This is not because he lets fame go to his
| head and likes having a posse around.
15:26:54 XXXXXXXXXXXX | They have made multiple runs at him.
15:27:29 esr | Implied warning noted.
15:27:34 * | XXXXXXXXXXXX nods

An A&D regular who is not myself was present for this conversation, but I’ll let him choose whether to confirm his presence and the content.

“They have made multiple runs at him.” Just let the implications of that sink in for a bit. If my source is to be believed (and I have found him both well-informed and completely trustworthy in the past) this was not a series of misunderstandings, it was a deliberately planned and persistent campaign to frame Linus and feed him to an outrage mob.

I have to see it as an an attempt to smear and de-legitimize the Linux community (and, by extension, the entire open-source community) in order to render it politically pliable.

Linus hasn’t spoken out about this; I can think of several plausible and good reasons for that. And the Ada Initiative shut down earlier this year. Nevertheless, this report is consistent with reports of SJW dezinformatsiya tactics from elsewhere and I think it would be safest to assume that they are being replicated by other women-in-tech groups.

(Don’t like that, ladies? Tough. You were just fine with collective guilt when the shoe was on the other foot. Enjoy your turn!)

I’m going to take my source’s implied advice. And view “sexual assault” claims fitting this MO with extreme skepticism in the future.

Why not honeytrap the honeytrappers with hidden audio/video recording devices? They might be illegal to use without consent in your jurisdiction, but then you need not reveal the recordings until you need to, and I don’t think “Arrest him for illegally recording evidence that proves my rape allegation was fake!” would fly.

Or just spread the word that many men are now using hidden recording devices to defend themselves this way. FUD can work for good.

Why not honeytrap the honeytrappers with hidden audio/video recording devices? […] Or just spread the word that many men are now using hidden recording devices to defend themselves this way.

Will do you no good, unless you have a full recording of every single such interaction, and some way to prove that you were never alone with this person and failed to record it. You’re trying to prove a negative, in a situation where (in public opinion at least, and sometime in a court of law) you have the burden of proof.

I was speaking with a female SA who’s duties I am taking over as she is transitioning out of the company. Let’s call her Fred.

Fred was attempting to work with another alleged SA in the organization, let’s call her Jim.

Fred was upset because $task was still not done. Jim asserted that she had not been given sufficient information for the task.

Fred stated “It’s a shell script. You run the SHELL SCRIPT”.

Jim then threatened to go to HR and complain about Fred. Note that both Fred and Jim are of the same sex, gender and ethnicity. However Fred is almost maximally competent. Jim should not be allowed to log in to a computer.

So yeah, I am not surprised by what ESR forwards.

There are PLENTY of examples in the last few years where once you put this little piece of information from this news source with that little bit of information from that article you get a picture that suddenly makes sense, and in a lot of cases what “makes sense” is SJW activism.

I think it’s revolting to change your behaviour because of the chance of someone telling lies about you. Never be alone with any female ever, for any purpose, indeed. For such a reaction, I’d want a pretty strong danger of something bad happening. Have any prominent tech figures been accused of sexual assault yet? If not, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d want to know what the potential bad things that could happen are and what the chances are of them. If the worst that can happen is that people say nasty things about you on the internet, just ignore them, or tell them to go to hell, either will do. Going to jail, or getting lynched due to false accusations are very unlikely. In between those are failing to get employment and losing the respect of others. Things like that could be a real problem, I suppose. But you should act proportionality to the risks and not get caught up in hysteria. I feel like that’s letting these activists win, making them appear more powerful than they really are, and consequently making people afraid to speak out against them.

>Don’t like that, ladies? Tough. You were just fine with collective guilt when the shoe was on the other foot. Enjoy your turn!

I doubt that all women were fine with collective guilt.

Saying that “they are out to get you” implies the existence of a “they”. I agree there is a “they”, but it requires some interpretation: not a large shadowy conspiracy, but culture, many small conspiracies, and individuals acting alone but influenced by culture.

Reading these replies years later because of the new escalation (linux CoC).
To your question, here’s why to just run a shell script and not a cron job: because the task is event driven, not clock driven, and coding up the perfect bug proof event-driver is cost-prohibitive.

The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference.

In addition, it’s probably a good idea to record every conference talk you give so you can refer to it when slandered. As you may know, the Nobel-Prize winning biologist Tim Hunt almost had his career ruined earlier this year. Speaking at a lunch during a conference, he had introduced himself to an audience of female scientists by self-depreciatingly calling himself “a chauvinist monster” who believed girls cause nothing but trouble and that labs should therefore be segregated by gender. A slanderous feminist quote-mined the segregated-labs part, accused him of sexist remarks, and thereby triggered an avalanche of outrage. Under immense public pressure, Hunt had to resign from most of his positions as a science advisor.

What ultimately stopped the avalanche — not sure if Hunt got his jobs back by now — was a tape of his speech that surfaced several days later. It proved that Hunt had indeed used self-depreciating humor, that the female audience had taken his remarks in the spirit he had given them in, and that it had responded with appreciative laughter.

That’s why prominent speakers who don’t want to rely on other people’s recording devices probably want to record their talks themselves.

Good news that this “group” is finally disbanding. Ada is actually a great programming language, and for a while it was pretty much impossible to use it publicly or advocate it because people would think that you were connected or endorsing those clowns.

I hadn’t thought it would go so far as deliberate entrapment yet, but the accelerating pace of SJW’s pushing for “codes of conduct”, #shirtgate, (never mind metalgate, sad puppies, and a Nobel laureate being taken down and made to resign, or Brendan Eich) makes it clear no-one is safe if they don’t bow before the collective, or band together and resist.

Randi Harper stuck her nose in once here, if I recall, and I am hard pressed to think of nastier and more bitter bully.

It’s not too far to this from what Brad Wardell at Stardock experienced – with a sexual harassment case so weak and trumped they extracted a written confession, and stopped there out of mercy. Nevertheless the same crowd responsible for “gamers are dead” and kicking sad puppies piled on without ever giving him a chance to defend himself, much less trying to defend him.

So SJW’s always lie, they always double down, and they always project.

In the meantime, resist all attempts at imposing codes of conduct (see the recent example of @rosarior over at awesome django).

On a practical “recording” note. Recording video AND audio single party is highly restricted and rare. Video single party is less rare. It’s why a lot of security footage doesn’t have audio, if I recall.

A number of states – South Carolina is one – are “single party” states for audio recording, in that only one party HAS to know the recording is taking place. In that case, feel free to carry an audio “spy” pen/ etc. all the time.

What the organiser leaves out of that post is that when Henson spoke to him in person, she made it clear that if BSidesSF didn’t comply with her demands, she would escalate to a public shaming campaign. (The organiser disclosed this to me in a personal conversation after the conference; it’s up to him whether he wants to confirm it. I don’t expect people to accept hearsay, but I’m stating what I know regardless.) This turned out to be a bluff, however, because Henson had already arranged with Marie Claire magazine to have a reporter and photographer on site to construct implications of misogyny. The profile of Henson that they ran in 2013 contained, in the print version, a page pullquoted and laid out so as to imply that three randomly-photographed hackers were at that moment engaged in attacking Adria Richards on Twitter. (With a much smaller caption, of course, for plausible deniability.)

Henson is an unrepentant sociopath who delights in emotional abuse. A former member of the AI told me that she stayed as long as she did only in the hopes of mitigating Val’s tendency to “take after” people (her words). When even your advisory board feels like they have to rein in your vengeful tendencies, you know you have a problem — or should, anyway. Val does not seem to have realised this, or care to.

A lot of somebodies are going to have to speak up. I’ve been trying to speak up since the Ada Initiative was founded, because I had already seen evidence of Val’s predatory nature several years beforehand. Only a few people were willing to listen to me, and they did so only to try to convince me that I should set personal matters aside for a greater good. Val has apparently encouraged the interpretation that my issues with her are a personal matter; another thing I found out during my conversation with the BSidesSF organiser in 2013 was that she asked him whether he’d spoken to me, and when he said no, advised him not to listen to anything I said because “[I’m] pissed at [Val] for stealing [my] boyfriend.”

In 2006 Val abused my trust and threatened to accuse me of harassing her when I called her to ask what the hell had just happened. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve buried a husband since then. So you can add “character assassination of people she’s harmed” to the list of characteristics as well.

It’s probably going to take an analogue of the Mixon Report to catalogue the extent of people Val has bullied, exploited and lied about in her career as a victimhood culture warrior.

I suppose I should clarify, since I did ultimately imply “at arms length” regarding the “women that I work with”…

I have complete professional respect for these women. They are superb and competent. Yet I feel that I must keep them at arms length – in a “walking on eggshells” sense – lest I trigger the vaginal fury of the demented feminist hellwitch.

Or…I just don’t need the fucking headache…and I really don’t want to strap on my asskicking boots to kick some misguided females into orbit.

As tempted as I am to snark, let me just point out that Always Be Recording is a good general principle in this current age even at your workplace. And never being alone with a female you do not know EXTREMELY well, ever, without doors open and recordings running. Those with whom you have established good long-term working relationships are on the flip side possibly a saving grace, possibly, depending on how well you know her; if she’s an ally she may be able to detect the snakes coming for you faster than you can as women are better at that as a rule than we are–just make sure the trust level is really high not “she’s such a nice person” trust. This should probably become policy in any workplace unless you’re lucky and not in a business larger than a few people.

This has been going on for a long time, gentlemen. No we were not paranoid. They’ve just run out of places to go and the nerds are their last frontier.

There is literally nothing SJWs won’t poison. My family’s roots lie in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Their ideological commissars are reincarnated as todays SJWs. They are clones – the impure must be purged by any means available.

Oh, and I think referring to this as a “honeytrap” tactic does not really get to how absolutely idiotic it is. We should call it what it actually is: a real-world boobytrap (pun intended, of course). Protip: any time there’s any possibility of being alone with a possible boobytrap, learn to speak up loudly and say that you’re “not comfortable” about the situation. You don’t even need to spell things out, and “I’m not comfortable” are persuasive words with this crowd. Let’s see what happens when we take their favorite weapon and turn it upon them.

@reader:
>I understand that was Billy Graham’s professional policy all his life. And for exactly the same reason.

Well, for religious leaders the reasoning goes a bit further than just the “the woman might make a false accusation of rape” angle. Gossips might make false accusations of extra-marital sex, spouses might become jealous (whether they make it known or dismiss it as irrational and deal with it internally), or in some situations, there is the possibility that something might actually happen, and, even though everything is consensual and even if nobody finds out, the leader would still have violated his personal principles.

Evolution has equipped us to handle many forms of threat and hardship from the natural world, and the last few thousand years of civilization has added a skill set for dealing with rogue hostiles that occasionally cross our path in life. However, the recent convergence of mass communication and memetic manipulation has given birth to a new threat matrix in our daily lives. For men, it’s natural to view these sorts of feminine attacks as being more of annoyance rather than an actual threat; but our judicial system is broken and the harm can be quite serious. If this pattern continues to worsen, men will soon switch from playing defense (and losing) to playing offense with serious intent. Should you find yourself making that transition, be very smart and very private.

All prophets, all great leaders, all wise men, through all the ages and on every continent, have warned against women getting involved in men’s business. Were they all wrong?

I am very open about my religious beliefs that men and women should not interact. I am extremely cordial to the women at work, but I don’t shake their hand or make small talk.

Women love drama, by their nature. It’s hard for us to imagine, because it’s not our nature. “It can’t be. That’s just misogyny…” Until it happens to you. Then you understand real quick.

More women in science and technology is more drama in science and technology. Ask Tim Hunt. You know, the Nobel laureate, decades at the top of his field. Literally hundreds of female scientists he personally mentored to success, not one of which defended him by the way. They took him down like a pack of lionesses.

Think you will fare better? Who the fuck are you in comparison? Some neckbeard.

Try being a male nurse sometime.
Any female nurse can be with any patient for any procedure, alone.
Just to protect my license I have to have a female with me for a lot of things I am required to do, and I have to make sure my chaperone is competent and qualified so no false claims can be made unsubstantiated.
It’s nearly an everyday thing.
So much for equal opportunity in the workplace.

Many men in education will not be alone with a student (M/F) in their office for the same reason. There was even a film using this motive: “The Life of David Gale”

It is not that there are many, or even few, students that will try to ruin their teacher. However, you only have to run into a single mental case out of the hundreds or thousands that sit in your classes over the years.

As usual, the problem is not the mental cases that do such things, but the people that believe them. We saw the same with the scandal of fake “recovered memories” about childhood abuse. Eventually, even the media got enough of that. Our hope is that this will happen in this area too.

But I myself think that this is already happening. This blog post is just a part of the rebound.

Guest: SJWs are not people of intellectual honesty, consistency, or principle. If you try shooting “I’m not comfortable” back at them, they will likely say something about how their job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Moreover, you’re playing into their frame and legitimizing their rhetoric. Tell me, how far has it gotten the Republicans to say that Democrats are the REAL racists? Have they managed to break 10% of the black vote?

Erik, the trick is say it loudly enough and often enough, and they’ll have to deal with it one way or the other.

And when the Republicrats say that Demopublicans are the _real_ racists, they’re BSing to some extent. There’s plenty of socially unpleasant views whithin the GOP, and it’s no good trying to hide them. You don’t need to dignify the word “racist” by throwing it at them, just call them out when they’re being bigoted and prejudiced. Again, persistence helps.

While there are nuances that make some less severe, there are only 11 “all party consent” states in the US: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington. The rest are one part consent, if you’re making a recording including your own voice you’re fine.

”
Will do you no good, unless you have a full recording of every single such interaction, and some way to prove that you were never alone with this person and failed to record it. You’re trying to prove a negative, in a situation where (in public opinion at least, and sometime in a court of law) you have the burden of proof.
”
it’s incredibly trivial to arrange with modern smartphones? You can also immediately upload to dropbox or something as long as properly fast network is available

Well, the battery drain will be SEVERE, but you can always carry a “hackerly” battery pack without too much trouble, and some modern phones already come with very spiffy batteries

My advice: stick to writing about tech, ’cause you make yourself look like a fool when you write about politics.
My father was a teacher, and he always followed the principle: “never be alone with a student (especially a female student)” as well. But claiming there is a conspiracy of “SJWs” out to make examples of “open source leaders”? That’s as absurd as claiming there is a conspiracy of greens, scientists and big government with regards climate change/global warming! Somehow thousands of people are all in it together!

Next you’ll be telling us that evolution is made up, and that actually goddunit. I also won’t be stockpiling gold, even if you think it’s a good idea.

Please continue to write about software, and how you do interesting things with time and GPS etc. But feel free to not show your ignorance in the fields of politics, economics, and similar.

But in any case, wise people know to always be prepared to defend. And considering I start a new position with some manglement responsibilities. . . .I just ordered a “spy pen” . . .

And @Meredith: Wow. While I’m not on the spectrum ( at least that I know of), I’ve always had similar issues, and so do my wife and daughters. Heck, that’s probably part of our family’s success: lots of other people don’t grok us, but we do grok each other, and that’s more than enough to make it work.

I knew something smelled wrong about how Sharp and a few others had an orchestrated fainting couch moment over the “toxic environment,” and now we have claims that an organization Sharp is a board member of is actively trying to frame Linus for Sexual Assault.

If you’re working with the Ada Initiative, I would suggest not doing so in the future. If you’re working in tech, make damned sure you’re never alone with someone, especially someone of the opposite sex, doubly so if that person is a feminist.

This story has a whiff of Eron Gjoni to it. Difficult to verify, but it fits people’s preconceived notions about what “SJWs” are really like, so it earns the attention –and credence — of “a certain crowd”.

So how do we know that this report isn’t some MRA tryna get back at those mean old SJWs for defining and enforcing norms of behavior that require people in open source to be respectful and not be dicks?

In the interests of scrupulous honesty, I will note that I have heard him grumble about “useless diversity hires” and remark that the women he works with who aren’t SJWs are unhappy with them too for making women who advanced on merit look bad. But this is the kind of thing any non-MRA might say when he thinks the PC police aren’t listening.

This is not a new issue, and the abuse of social conventions by Radical Feminists using any means to justify their madness will continue. For those interested in pushing back there is an interesting option in funding a Film – the Red Pill – by Cassie Jaye.

> It has been shown that Gjoni was out to get personal revenge on Zoe Quinn for breaking up with him

The behavior he alleged on her part during the relationship was, objectively, emotional abuse. We are told that we are supposed to automatically side with supposed victims of abuse, and automatically side against accused abusers. We are not told that this only applies when the supposed victims are women and the supposed abusers are men.

>You don’t know his source. All we can infer from, at least, the part you quoted, is that he heard this and believed it, not that he has firsthand or even secondhand knowledge.

I’m handicapped by not being able to reveal things that would make him more credible but also provide strong clues to his identity. Unlike me, he has a career that could be destroyed by a full-on SJW attack – and neither of us thinks they would hesitate to target him for speaking truth to their power. He doesn’t want to be Eiched, and I will not put him at that risk.

So all I can say is that I think I have excellent reason to believe him.

I’ve researched and written about the Ada Initiative before. They are what you would expect; a mentally disheveled and broken group of women who’ve adopted lesbian supremacist ideology as their own personal religion. For some reason they think if they use the words “feminist” and “social justice” enough they can get away with the most sociopathic bigoted behaviors.

To no one’s surprise Ada is worshipped in the science fiction community, yet another hobby which has been destroyed by a crusade to fight “whiteness” and the cruel oppression of the “gender binary” and pass it off as “social justice,” mostly without a hint of self-awareness of where their ideology even comes from. See: Judith Butler’s war of the pronouns.

And let me assure you of something regarding Laura Mixon and Requires Hate: that is an inter-KKK feud. As long as RH was comparing white men to the intelligence of “buffaloes” everything was just peachy, since Mixon herself writes inspiring essays about the “unconscious bias of white men.”

Hi, I’ve been active in the open source movement since 1999 as a graphic designer. Radical feminism has always been lurking like a dark shadow over the geek community. Under the disguise to encourage more women into tech, the feminist groups would try hard to paint their male counterparts as evil perpetrators and potential harassers. If that’s not enough, they also would lash out to women who dared not to support their hideous narrative. I for example had my work labeled “sexist” a couple of times, other women were criticised over their supposedly “sexualising” outfits. Such behaviour doesn’t encourage women to join the tech community, it drives them away and it leaves a hostile environment for those who stay, male or female. It’s sad to see how far things have come, I would hope that some more people will speak up and make this stop.

P. S. BTW Eric, we once met IRL at a conference in Germany back in 2001-ish. That was when you played western concert flute and RMS was trying to compete with his singing abilities against you… Oh, those were times. :)

After Winter’s first post in this thread, I thought: “Wow, he didn’t figure out a way to blame the United States!” And then he goes and blows it with a second post….

@Anonymous 4982: Don’t be an idiot. There’s a big difference between: “Everyone who agrees with X is part of a vast conspiracy” and “The vast number of people who agree with X includes some who are conspiring.”

PapayaSF, sex offender registries only exist in the anglosphere; and the USA is the only country with publicly available sex offender registries which have the chilling effect of pretty much ostracizing people from the community (and increasing the chance of reoffense, because it’s not like they have a good job, a good reputation, or a nice place to live that they could lose by reoffending). So yes, much of the concern about sex offender registries is based on things which are unique to the United States.

The harsh laws against public nudity are intended to protect children from the likes of “flashers” (and if a perv comes to your neighborhood and flashes your teenage daughter in the park you will want such protection) but also to close loopholes in the law that would allow offenders to plea-bargain down to a lesser offense.

It doesn’t make much sense, but then again neither does the adversarial judicial system or system of plea bargaining.

“My advice: stick to writing about tech, ’cause you make yourself look like a fool when you write about politics.
My father was a teacher, and he always followed the principle: “never be alone with a student (especially a female student)” as well. But claiming there is a conspiracy of “SJWs” out to make examples of “open source leaders”? That’s as absurd as claiming there is a conspiracy of greens, scientists and big government with regards climate change/global warming! Somehow thousands of people are all in it together!

Next you’ll be telling us that evolution is made up, and that actually goddunit. I also won’t be stockpiling gold, even if you think it’s a good idea.

Please continue to write about software, and how you do interesting things with time and GPS etc. But feel free to not show your ignorance in the fields of politics, economics, and similar.”

^^ A classic 5th column type of comment. Appeal to Authority Fallacy. Extensive use of shaming (a variant of the appeal to authority play). And blanketing possible concerns under the shame blanket, as if they were all the same thing – I call this the Bad Heuristics Fallacy. Smells 5th column to me.

If there is an established MO, there should already be previous examples of public accusations of sexual assault at tech conferences. There are none so far. So right off the bat it is obvious that your source is not telling the truth.

Also, it is hilarious to watch the over pouring of confirmation bias here. If a woman were to make a claim, nothing short of video clips from multiple angles would convince the people that the woman was telling the truth. But idiotic gossip that panders to their biases is so readily believed.

At least the Scientologists don’t go making wild accusations. They’re rigorous enough to collect evidence, in the form of confessions of what your body thetans did in previous lifetimes, before going public with their accusations. lulz

@asdf: The Wikipedia controversy regarding “Cultural Marxism” is especially egregious. Some punk dictator called Jobrot controls it, and insists it’s a “conspiracy theory.” Funny thing is, Wikipedia has no problem attempting balance on such topics as “rape culture,” which is just as much (if not more) a fringe or “conspiracy theory.” Not that everything Marxist is a conspiracy, but countless groups of Marxists have had various sizes of conspiracies for over a century. There’s one (or more) behind every Communist revolution (or attempt) in the 20th century. It’s simply indisputable historical fact. Sheesh.

@Jeff Read, it’s silly to say “the modernist movement in art, for instance, was recently revealed to be a CIA psyop!” The modernist movement predates the CIA by at least 40 years. Yes, they funded some people in the ’50s, but it was very little and very late.

Yeah, this looks like circular reasoning, an infinite recursion bug. Assigning collective guilt is okay, because some of the targets were okay with it, and we can therefore blame all of the targets because assigning collective guilt is okay?

If you think your battery life is bad now, try recording yourself 24/7. If you and lithium-ion technology can only conveniently manage N%, then that leaves you with a 100-N% of having no alibi for a false allegation.

We all carry a recording device at all times (get bambuser on your phone now!). And it is perfectly legal to record a conversation as long as both parties agree. So, if you’re ever in a situation with a woman, simply record the entire thing after getting consent from that woman. Problem solved. If a woman doesn’t want to be recorded, then politely explain that it is not possible for us to be alone due to the number of honeytraps that are set for men these days.

Jeff Read, not quite. What we found out is that the CIA funded largely-independent modernist/formalist art, giving it a boost over directly Soviet-influenced “socialist-realist art”. The enemy of my enemy, and all that. The Marxist influence was going to be there in either case, but that wasn’t a huge issue anyway.

* “(Don’t like that, ladies? Tough. You were just fine with collective guilt when the shoe was on the other foot. Enjoy your turn!)” *

I want to point out that this is really unfortunate circular reasoning. You are using collective guilt to justify collective guilt.

I have, from the beginning, been horrified by the actions of neo-feminists. I understand your caution, but please don’t blame those of us who have fought on the side of free speech and negative liberty.

I appreciate all you have given us with this post, and all the support Linus and his ilk have been given. Keep fighting the good fight.

Jeff Read, not quite. What we found out is that the CIA funded largely-independent modernist/formalist art, giving it a boost over directly Soviet-influenced “soci**ist-realist art”. The enemy of my enemy, and all that. The Marxist influence was going to be there in either case, but that wasn’t a huge issue anyway.

Sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that “I wasn’t advocating treating all women as collectively guilty, but suggesting a rebuttable presumption about all “women-in-tech” advocacy groups.” is not a fair characterization of what you said. You may well have a justified reason to advocate treating all women as collectively guilty, or arguably your use of the term “collective guilt” was flippant and the treatment you were actually suggesting was not intended as a “punishment” at all, but you were certainly not merely “suggesting a rebuttable presumption”.

@Random832: To say: “there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp” isn’t really “collective guilt.” I think Eric used an imprecise term. It’s more of a generalized warning, like “all men are potential rapists” and similar feminist/SJW statements, but actually less sweeping than many (“all men benefit from rape culture,” “you have white privilege”).

When I lock my car, I am not implying that all strangers are collectively guilty of car theft, I am simply assuming that some of them might be car thieves.

Critical theory is a mind-virus, that’s all that is needed for the purported fruits of “cultural Marxism” to manifest, not an organized conspiracy. So even if you’ve decided that everybody using the term is a dumb Bircher, they can be dumb and still be more right than you are.

More to the point of the topic, there is a big leap from “AI members have been scheming sociopaths” to “AI literally has been attempting sexual entrapment and blackmail to take down people embarrassingly immune to their machinations.” And then, secondhand to the person writing about it. No offense to ESR, but the ability to independently verify this is nil, and this is a story that has turned out bad many times before, in addition to being used as a tactic by SJWs themselves (“what do you do when someone pulls the pin and hands you a live grenade?”) Not taking a pro or con on this, just waiting for more info.

Here are my thoughts — the solution is the technological one outlined above. Maybe the fact that you might have to record these interactions pisses you off enough that you don’t want to engage, which seems perfectly reasonable, but the technology does address the problem.
Up to a point anyway. The alternative viewpoint is that if I am some particularly evil SJW, I can do a small amount of research, find out which hotel you are staying at alone, then claim you met me in a bar, invited me up to “mentor” me and molested me. I can do that without even meeting you.
Another interesting point, why only women? I mean you Open Source whores might be using your power to attack innocent, stary eyed boys too, n’est pas? The fact that it is only women is kind of funny in “we are super liberal but don’t practice what we preach” kind of a way.
Final point, unless you are concerned with legal jeopardy, which seems unlikely in the absence of realistic evidence, why do you care? I mean the people who are your audience are not generally SJWs, and they would surely accept your mocking derision as sufficient to dismiss the silliness. I suppose you might get banned from a few colleges, but you can still do your thing in the local college bar. It might be quite popular. (Stay away from the barmaids though….)

>Sure, but how is one to know which category one is dealing with?
>It’s not imputing guilt to all snarks to observe that some of them might be boojums, and you can’t tell which in advance.

On the other hand, this is exactly the same horrible reasoning that “rape culture” advocates use to justify treating all men as potential rapists, treating all innocent social and romantic overtures as outright harrassment and promoting “yes means yes (unless it means no and only if there was no pressure direct, indirect or societal so you should probably get a psych eval and a contract before engaging in flirting let along potential rape)”

As far as “sexual assault” and “confirmation bias,” remember we’re dealing with a specific advocacy group which has proven itself to be irrationally hostile towards men. ADA once listed a woman named Selena Deckleman as a part of sexual harassment in tech. The woman’s beef was that being ignored at a booth while men next to her were asked questions was sexual harassment. ADA’s “timeline” of sexual harassment in tech is a bizarre, thin-skinned fantasy. I don’t think we’re being unfair to “women” seeing as how I at least see gender feminists as being perhaps statistical zero of all women in America. The fact there is a statistical spike in tech, comics, gaming and SFF is itself a bizarre anomaly.

This “plot” need not have been “assault”; “harassment would’ve done just fine. A Tor Books editor named James Frenkel was fired for some comment he made in front of a group at the WisCon SF convention. To this day no one will say what it was, which leads me to believe it was so trivial the people who claimed it was “sexual harassment” are afraid it will undermine their cause. Nevertheless it was a substantial witchhunt at the time. The same community just went nuts over the lack of a harassment policy at a con which fit that goofy ideology’s hyper-paranoia of men. You’d think these geek fests were a Hell’s Angel’s party the way they talk about them. And guess who these feminists recommended as a model harassment policy for that con? That’s right; ADA’s.

This ideology verges on insane. Now Princess Leia dolls with the slave outfit are being banned by Disney and a comic artist at Marvel claims he can’t draw it or even sexy poses even while tie-in novel author Chuck Wendig (himself an aching font of feminist knee-bending) personally lobbied Disney for permission to write in more gays. Presumably none will be in belly-dancing outfits. That’s in keeping with the sick hysteria at the SFWA over a Red Sonja painting which resulted in any Frazetta-like painting now being tabu. You’ll forgive me if I laugh at “confirmation bias.” I could list examples until my eyes bleed.

@Goda: “If there is an established MO, there should already be previous examples of public accusations of sexual assault at tech conferences. There are none so far. So right off the bat it is obvious that your source is not telling the truth.

Also, it is hilarious to watch the over pouring of confirmation bias here. If a woman were to make a claim, nothing short of video clips from multiple angles would convince the people that the woman was telling the truth. But idiotic gossip that panders to their biases is so readily believed.”

5th column rinse and repeat. There have been accusation of sexual assault at conferences. There have been situations like dongle-gate at conferences. There have been SJW incidents that have given rise to false accusations.

Regarding the confirmation bias – the original confirmation bias was that women don’t make false accusations and this is reflected in our systems (LEO, legal, policy). The failure of this bias has been exposed. And finally, a strawman/shaming attempt at categorizing many comments as equivalent to saying “all women are liars”, which is fallacious on its face.

Well, that and treating all women as being guilty-until-proven-innocent of being a member of such a group. You did say don’t be alone with any “female”, not with any member of such a group.

You’ve heard of Schrödinger’s Rapist? Meet his ex-girlfriend, Schrödinger’s SJW with a vendetta. And there have been enough documented cases of SJWs behaving badly to make this a concern, whether the OP’s allegations about the Ada Initiative “collecting scalps” is true or not.

The fact is that if you don’t know who you’re dealing with, conservative and defensive behavior is absolutely warranted. Sometimes I wish that SJWs would understand this, instead of blathering about “teaching men not to rape”, as if people who can’t be taught not to rape without profound physical pain did not exist.

You see, Jeff, to the SJWs, all men are rapists, period, no exceptions. Even SJW men are.

Is it any wonder that men are opting out of the college dating scene entirely?

And I won’t be greatly surprised if that happens in tech, either.

And, @relax (I hate the @-convention outside of places where it actually carries semantic meaning, like Twitter, but it’s needed here), why should we accept suggestions on how to deal with SJWs from an SJW? All you want is our utter capitulation and destruction. I reject suggestions from Democrats on how to appeal to minorities (hint: “become like us” is precisely the wrong answer), and I reject suggestions from SJWs on how to appeal to them. The only thing SJWs merit is contempt.

“Chances are, if an author takes a public stand against harassment of any kind (gender, race, sexuality, in person, online, in print, in professional associations, etc.), they probably write better books. Books that have interesting, surprising plot twists because they don’t rely on lazy sexist tropes. Books that have believable, varied characters instead of paper cut-outs supporting the straight white male protagonist.” – from the Ada Initiative website

They then proceed to list some of the worst gender feminist bigots in SFF.

For those of you who know what happened at Altamont, think, “Please allow me to introduce myself… I have an anti-harassment policy.” I urge everyone to visit Ada’s site; it is a padded-cell.

They have the story of a sexual groping incident that happened to Norin Shirley.

Although the Ada Initiative which links to the story claims it happened “at ApacheCon,” it in fact happened at a pub.

Here are the parts of Miss Shirley’s story that leaped out at me:

“The party moved up to my room. We had beer… I lay across the bed, sat on laps… …we headed to the Irish pub next door… …a few more beers. I had a few drinks. I was wearing a skirt of such a length that I had cycling shorts on under it to make me feel more comfortable getting up on stage and dancing. I had been flirting with a couple of other boys at the party.”

Surprise! Someone touched her!!!

Now, keeping in mind those quotes, think on this. The Ada Initiative has a link on a page which says “triggers people to view women as sexual objects.”

That link brings you to this definition of what constitutes such a trigger:

“A sexualized environment is one where sexual activity or sexy clothing or behaviour are prominent. This often occurs in geek environments and, by prominently displaying women as sexy, available for sex, or “other” than the predominantly male geek attendees, may make women uncomfortable.”

If that is not the very devil’s definition of a blatant double standard and hypocrisy, or even breezy insanity, then such things simply do not exist in this world. Apparently it doesn’t count if women are “prominently displaying women as sexy.” And throw alcohol in any mix like that and yes, it is a “trigger,” which is FemSpeak for “you’re asking for it.” Except when you’re not. In other words, the Ada Initiative both promotes and denies the existence of triggers. Predictably, our darling feminists define each by gender, not principle. This shows the “you-asked-for-it” and “slut walks” for the semantic and intellectual gibberish and straight up bigotry they are.

I ride a mountain bike in Colorado (a lot). In the cycling community, it is common courtesy to offer aid when encountering another biker in distress (usually a flat tire). Three weeks ago I am riding through a remote section of a state park and encounter a mature woman (late 40s), dressed in fancy spandex, and walking a $10K carbon fiber road bike. She is not fit, so that should have been my first caution. I offer aid and fix her flat tire. She chats me up persistently and hovers inches from me will I work, occasionally putting her hands on me. I start working faster. She asks for my first and last name, what part of town in live in, where I work, etc. Friendly tone, but way to personal for a chance encounter with a stranger. I was polite but standoffish, and as I finished up, she became irritated and asked me directly why I would not flirt with her. Honestly, I don’t know if she was lonely, horny, or predatory; but I left in a hurry.

@PapayaSF
“After Winter’s first post in this thread, I thought: “Wow, he didn’t figure out a way to blame the United States!” And then he goes and blows it with a second post….”

When attacking SJW for possible rumoured honey traps, you all forget the very real damage done to men. I have never heard of any other country where men get on a public sex offenders list for peeing against a tree. If you now of such countries, please inform me.

I my the silly expansion of sex offender is linked to the SJW syndrome. I would call this Social Fundamentalism the Taliban Syndrome: The Compulsive drive to separate men and women in public live.

I think the Boy Scouts have set up a reasonable policy to prevent impropriety, to prevent the appearance of impropriety and to prevent unfounded accusations with their Youth Protection policy. I volunteer with a couple of organizations that sometimes include minors and the policies of those groups (when minors are involved) are quite similar.

Julian assange comes to mind, and many other names in the world…. wont be the first or the last time this is why even before I read this I “NEVER” trust sources of mass information like mass media etc. I have to see it for myself or really know all the angles.

I would ask your “source” for more information, because this is exactly the sort of rumor that is autogenerated from existing political viewpoints or the misheard comments of others. Also we could do some basic fact-checking. You could email Linus and ask him if it was true or ask for past examples when this has happened. Otherwise it is impossible to separate this from a Snopes urban legend. As someone who you can view as a “source” I know people close to both sides of this debate. The tactics described here this are a very very improbable strategy for someone to plan and execute without many people who would be uncomfortable with it finding out and warning others. Think Eric of all the people you know personally who are involved in AI or similar organizations. How could this be planned without those people discovering it and yet someone who has little contact suddenly knows about it.

Unsubstantiated claims like this are damaging to anyone else who aims to criticize movements on a more disciplined basis. I know many people who are unhappy with the Ada Initiative’s work but who keep their criticisms to themselves because their realistic but milder words will be aggregated and dismissed along with rumors like this. We should all work hard not to fall into error whether that is generated by your own assumptions or maliciously by your opponents.

For those of you in doubt, you have already been provided with proof of the open and public collusion of the “geek feminist” community to lower the standards of sexual harassment and rape to near zero. That is ideological entrapment and as close to illicit entrapment as one can get without engaging in an illicit act. That not only shows a lack of ethics but a lack of awareness such a thing even exists. In other words if men aren’t breaking the law, then change the law until they do. These are maniacs.

It is about what one would expect of people who are at once arrogant and brutally stupid. They can never quite figure out why their plans go awry or why no one recognizes their brilliance. If only men would stop acting like men and whites stop acting like whites and heterosexuality realize it’s just a fake ideology fit only for a circus sideshow. Are we surprised the origins of this lesbian supremacist ideology lie in exactly that world view; one where a handful of mentally ill and paranoid women created a theory of sexuality which “proves” normal people are an oppression and extended that to the Third Wave “intersectionality” of weight, ableisms, “whiteness,” “neuroatypical,” and a host of other bizarre expressions which casts Mother Nature as Adolph Hitler?

They always show their true colors, only they are the ones that engage in disinformation tactics, well poisoning, and he-said/she-said pseudo-argumentation. And that’s why they are so quick to accuse YOU of doing that, it’s the oldest and the lamest trick in the book.

Remember, they want power and wealth, that’s why they are after fat targets, and after anyone and everyone that gets in their way, man or woman.

What they haven’t learned from history yet, is that fundamentalist like them have never won, they collapse under their own weight, fallacies, contradictions and their tactics turn against themselves.

@James May – fucking A, bro. At this point it’s almost a moral requirement to calmly dissect their rhetoric and to spread it loud and far so that the infection is well understood by the public. Ignorance of fascism is the same as tolerance of it.

As a woman -who regards cathedral and bazaar highly- I am truly disappointed.
Your advice is the same as “never be alone with a guy in a room”.
Meant in a “hey little girl, never ever be alone with a MAN. he WILL rape you.”-way. How sad. I thought we were just over this bullshit.

I am truly disappointed.
Your advice is the same as “never be alone with a guy in a room”.
Meant in a “hey little girl, never ever be alone with a MAN. he WILL rape you.”-way. How sad. I thought we were just over this bullshit.

Elsewhere on the ’net you may find proponents of the slogan, “Don’t teach women to protect themselves; teach men not to rape.” Not on this site.

Here you will find people who find that slogan insane (if the intent is to actually reduce rape) or evil (if the intent is to sacrifice women for political gain). Here you will find the slogan, “Teach men not to rape; teach women to avoid dangerous situations; and teach women to shoot and kill rapist.” (Or someone might have a pithier wording.)

You teach kids to look both ways before they cross the street; you don’t simply demand car drivers not hit them. You buy area-appropriate protection against burglars: locked doors, bars, safes, guns, etc.; you don’t put up a sign that says, “Swiper, no swiping.”

@human “As a woman -who regards cathedral and bazaar highly- I am truly disappointed.
Your advice is the same as “never be alone with a guy in a room”.

Sadly, all it takes in many situations is a mere *accusation* of something -anything- deemed “improper”, and you’re smeared or blackballed for life, and that includes being fired from a job or kicked out of school. 99% of the time it’s a woman making the accusation against a man. (Yes it sometimes goes the other way, but not very often.) So honestly, it’s not hard to see why so many men are gun-shy about being around women when the stakes are so high and the bar to entry (a simple accusation) is so low.

I hate the whole thing too, but the fact is that this is what it’s come to. :(

@Mike: It’s not just that “the bar to entry (a simple accusation) is so low,” it’s that the consequences of false accusations are often slight or non-existent. It’s tempting to make the penalty for a false accusation of X the same as the penalty for X….

As someone who happened to be born female and pursue a career in tech, I’ve noticed this phenomenon as well. If I wished to become famous for a scandal, I could easily destroy the public reputation of any male colleague by suggesting misconduct. I could attack someone I’d never met in person — for instance, it’s trivially easy to fake screen shots of conversations in social media, and on line news is not famed for its diligence in verifying the authenticity of such sources. My basic human right to be treated with respect should not imply a right to easily ruin the career of anyone I dislike.

I agree that pervasive, personal logging is the best option right now for men to prove their innocence when attacked in this way, but it still comes at a potentially severe cost to their own privacy and reputations — “he was actually at a doctor’s appointment for an embarrassingly personal condition” might be nearly as unpleasant to see in the news as “famous technologist ravages innocent lady”.

Maybe you can’t identify with this because you are not in the same position as someone like Torvalds. Maybe you aren’t the kind of person that these people are targeting. There’s a reason why POTUS is surrounded by a human shield of Secret Service Agents.

Of course, once Islam takes over this will cease to be a problem. Men and women will be separated. Feminists will no longer exist. I find it faintly amusing that these predatory females are still out to get civilised males when there are women being forced to cover their heads and be treated as second-class citizens in the same country and they say not one word about it. Too busy checking their privililges, I suppose.

“Conspiracy” is a charged term, however it is pretty appropriate to describe how SJWs operate. They do collude and premeditate actions that directly seek to destroy individuals that are not “right thinking”. I first saw this repugnant behavior in the atheist/skeptic communities some ~8 years ago – in no time flat forums everywhere changed from being genuinely freethinking places of discussions to dull rigidly policed groupthink parroting. Even the slightest deviation from SJW orthodoxy was immediately punished with public shaming and blacklists of names were circulated. There was a full scale purge of undesirables and this idiocy persists still today. Atheism/skepticism is now dead to me.

Nothing that has happened since in sci-fi, gaming, Occupy, the European Pirate Party, even places as underground as the BDSM community have surprised me in the least. Everywhere, the same template is being used to poison wells and undermine community spirit. You think this can’t happen to open source, then you are seriously naive – and that attitude is *precisely* what SJWs exploit.

There have been numerous rape smear accusations amongst skeptics in this time period, most notable that against Michael Shermer. Yes there were secret mailing lists where these actions were planned and executed (freethoughtblogs, skepchick etc.), just as there was the game journal pro list in #gamergate as well as DiGRA colluding to ideologically poison gaming tech education.

People don’t like the word “conspiracy” – tough. It’s the ugly reality though. Get used to it. Either deal with it or allow yourselves to be overrun. This is what is happening.

human, the fact is that in the USA presumption of innocence is a minor procedural detail that applies at trial only. The appearance of impropriety is impropriety, and in this society we see fit to exclude people who may be sexual offenders as a form of risk mitigation.

So it behooves men to avoid situations which have even the appearance of impropriety if we wish to preserve our honor and avoid dire consequences.

Aaron, thanks for the link. The man was a delightful talker, and for all I know, everything he said was true. Or at least everything he said which wasn’t a prediction.

If anyone would rather read the interview about just how malevolent and effective Soviet foreign policy was from the point of view of a KGB agent, here’s a transcript.

It’s kind of amazing that we slobs and blobs, fools and nitwits, ended up winning– or at least outlasting the USSR. I’ve certainly heard more about how everything is America’s fault, but it’s reasonable that the KGB were players, too. And I suspect that even just paying attention to the KGB and CIA won’t give you a full explanation.

@human: How dare you attempt to womansplain to us rather than meekly accepting the revealed knowledge of our collective and individual male experience in dealing with the problem of false accusations of misbehavior. As a woman you cannot possibly understand what it is like to go through your life terrified of ever being alone with someone like you while at work or at a conference. The casual life of privilege you have experienced prevents you from understanding or even recognizing the male reality. You are confident in the protection and support of the feminist matriarchy, which means you cannot ever possibly experience what it means to be a true victim of sexism.

About half tongue in cheek. Seriously, though, “Never be alone with a woman at work” has been standard operating procedure for men for my whole career in the tech industry (and that covers quite a few years now). As a woman, I’m not surprised you aren’t aware of it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,. This is just raising the level of precaution a notch or two to reflect an increased threat level. And yes, it’s rather unfortunate, but less personally expensive than a false accusation that cannot be refuted.

@franc: Don’t forget “journolist”. The patterns you point out are undeniable, and there are communities you don’t name that I am also aware of. It is not paranoia when there really are people out to get you, and they don’t all have to be in the conspiracy in order for a conspiracy to exist.

I am truly disappointed.
Your advice is the same as “never be alone with a guy in a room”.
Meant in a “hey little girl, never ever be alone with a MAN. he WILL rape you.”-way. How sad. I thought we were just over this bullshit.

Yeah right, that pseudo-analogy exactly the same as what esr described IN DETAIL. Because fuck context right?

So addressing the FACTS that a minority of indoctrinated women and MEN are pushing an agenda of hate and criminal persecution, displacing well respected and accomplished men AND women that will not toe their line out of their jobs and ruining lives both in the civil and criminal realm, all of that is exactly as brainwashing a girl into fear of all men, just because they are men, branding into her psyche the totally unfounded premise that “all men are rapist, because I say so”

Yeah, those are totally the same thing, I don’t know how I didn’t catch it sooner. /s

If, as you stated, are a woman in tech, please don’t let your bias get in the way of critical thinking, do not take these issues as an attack on your gender. That’s of course, if there’s still hope for you that you honestly want to see and acknowledge the truth.

These fundamentalist want two things more than anything: they want to be the establishment, they want power and money. If you become a target they will give zero fucks you are a woman, they will resort to the dirtiest tactics to destroy you.

And please, do not be so purposely blind: heed esr’s advice and try to see the whole picture. IF YOU HAVE TO DEAL WITH A SELF PROCLAIMED FEMINIST MAN, DO THE EXACT SAME THING, DO NOT MEET IN PRIVATE.

They are a cult, if you are not one of them you join or will be expelled from the tech industry.

“Never be alone with a woman at work” has been standard operating procedure for men for my whole career in the tech industry (and that covers quite a few years now). As a woman, I’m not surprised you aren’t aware of it.

It’s gotten to the point that women are now complaining in newspaper articles that men won’t go into closed-door meetings with them, meet them at lunches or after work dinners, etc. out of fear of accusations of sexism or harassment, and that they thus miss out on valuable networking experience and mentorship.

I am struck by the thought that after spending a generation asking men not to sexually harass them at work, women are now complaining that men are not sexually harassing them at work.

It is, of course, funny only because it plays fast and loose with the definition of sexual harassment, and will probably offend someone.

The next step will be to eliminate all lunches or after-work dinners so as to avoid both sexual harassment and the loss of valuable networking experience, and life at work will become a uniform shade of dismal grey as everyone is reduced to the lowest, and safest, common denominator.

I follow Mrs. Tim Hunt on Twitter. I forwarded the link to this post by way of NRx alt-right Jokeocracy (Duck) #RedneckLivesMatter

Almost all the comments here, agreeing with ESR, ARE correct. Meredith Patterson, for example, is a nice lady and is highly credible.

ESR: as others have intimated in comments, this isn’t a problem that is unique to open source, nor to undermining it, even though it certainly has that effect. Applications programming, closed source, and technology in general has been affected by the SJW fascist agenda. Keep in mind that there were MORE women in many areas of technology in the past, over 20 years ago, than there are now. My alma mater, Swarthmore College, is a good example. There were more female mathematics, engineering and physics majors back when I was there. That was prior to the massive growth in women’s studies, gender studies, oppressed minority studies and so forth.

Ms. Kesselman, thanks for that Twitter link. Following some links, I discovered a wrinkle in the besmirching of Tim Hunt I had not previously been aware of: the false claims by a journalist that he was given, and ignored, a public chance to explain his comments. Oops; turns out he wasn’t even at the talk where this alleged follow-up happened.

(Let the names of such journalists be remembered, so any news teams they join can be treated with appropriate skepticism: Sue Nelson has—just barely—acknowledged that her claim was incorrect, but says people are mean and nasty for pointing this out to her. Looks like Vox Day’s Rule #2 [or #3?] at work: “SJWs always double down.”)

@Nancy Lebovitz: You are wellcome. The only thing that gave me pause, and got me pondering deeply is the natural reaction that the journalist had in asking: “ok, what can we do to neutralize this trend? Please give us the antidote to counter-act this programming, this physiological warfare that’s permeated the american society?” That wasn’t literal, but something on those lines…

And Mr. Bezmenov replied quite eloquently and in detail, but some red flag went up inside me when I heard “the basic values of Americanism, of American Patriotism” around the 6′:30″ mark.

I tend to hear closely when someone starts useing “-isms” in their terms, especially in the context of masses, be they a handful of people, a few hundred, a few thousand or the whole society of a nation.

The natural reaction of a person that is being told that is being manipulated is to quickly ask for ways to diffuse that programming, you desperately want tools to break free of any and all forms of manipulation. I’ll be damn if I know the answer to that, but I’m quite confident in what it is NOT about: going from one extreme of the political spectrum to the opposite, to become a blind nationalist.

Those are gut re-actions, and as the word says, you are reacting in the face of imminent danger, to yourself as an individual and to the society you belong. That’s the worst approach in my mind.

All in all, (and I had to listen once again to his answer just to be sure) he replied very well: @7′:25″: “patriotically minded, common sense people, one preferably two generations of them”

Not fanatics defenders of a flag, or of the abstract idea of a nation, or a large patch of soil, but common sense, critical thinking individuals, that refuse to be indoctrinated, neither from the right nor from the left extremist.

And that’s particularly difficult in the american society, there’s to much history of segregation and socioeconomic alienation, a blind adoration for the almighty dollar, a relentless attack on science from the right and “establishment” religions, multinational corporations and other bad actors that are just “to big to fail” (wallstreet, banks, etc) Throw in the military-espionage-defense-industrial complex and you have yourself a cluster-fuck of a sociological party.

TL;DR: manipulation/indoctrination looses only to a good, integral education, books, a healthy upbringing, teachers that foster critical thinking abilities from the earliest age possible and getting involved.

Apathy/indifference to these issues sooner or later will come back and bite you in the ass.

———————————————————

Now that many more people are connecting the dots, this is another relentless attack from this toxic and dangerous cult:

They are after freedom of expression in the only medium they have still not been able to completely co-opt, the internet. They want U.S. Code § 230 to die, they need to remove it to censor dissenting voices, facts and everything that opposes their dogma.

As Vox Day says, SJWs always lie. I should know; I used to run with them until they turned on *me* for calling out kafkatrap behaviour (thank you for that term, BTW). Saw it first many years ago, but mostly confined to the left coast or the wymynz lesbian knitting circle. I tuned out a few years ago when Ivy Leaguers started with the privilege check horseshit.

It feels a LOT like 1993 for those of you old enough to remember the vibe. But then again, NGOs have always been crawling with crazy cat ladies (have had to work around a few in my time).

Valerie Henson, FWIW, is notorious around SF Bay Area fandom for chiming in and helping out the smear campaign against her father promulgated by the scientology cult, although she hasn’t claimed to be a victim herself.

Back when he got divorced from her mother, her mother tried out the standard “accuse him of molestation” gambit, which her mother has since recanted. Valerie, however, clearly hasn’t forgiven him for leaving, and is seeking to punish all men as a proxy for her father.

Regarding Arthur Chu: his claim to notoriety comes from having demonstrated a good memory for trivia and winning the game show “Jeopardy”. The game requires no intellectual abilities beyond memory, so I don’t find it very impressive. After all, a computer could do it.

Final point, unless you are concerned with legal jeopardy, which seems unlikely in the absence of realistic evidence, why do you care?

In court, “she said so” is evidence, as long as she’s willing to say it again on the stand. If the accusation is of something that doesn’t leave physical evidence — i.e., she claims a grope instead of full intercourse, or claims it happened ten months ago and she only just now found the courage to report — it will be “realistic.” (And don’t worry, there’ll be an expert in “counterintuitive victim behavior” to explain that her “delayed report” is perfectly normal for real victims and in no way reduces her credibility. It’s not just realistic – it’s positively scientific!).

Whether it will be believed is a separate question, but there are people like this and that, who think “believing the victim” is a social duty…and they can get jury duty, as can the people they influence.

Also FYI, the mods on reddit’s r/technology board are suppressing this story on the flimsy premise that SJWs attempting to smear notable engineers isn’t “about technology”. Since they routinely allow stories that aren’t about technology in any way at all, it’s obvious that they’re full of shit.

@Random Observer yeah, but they also don’t think that articles about SOPA, Comcast, Bitcoin, the EFF, the NSA, the FCC, net neutrality, Aaron Swartz, Flappy Bird, or Tesla are about technology, so the most probable hypothesis is that they’re generically full of shit. They got kicked out of the default subscription list.

One thing for sure: the tech women making false claims did not consider their “targets” Alpha men they wanted to bed. Women are absolutely cruel to Betas, Omegas, etc.. They despise “lesser”‘ men because they are the only men who show interest in them–correctly so, as I’m sure virtually all of these tech women are 5s at best–thus, they feel cheated out of their rightful Alpha sex and take it out on any Beta they can.

Eric, you have no evidence of this actually happening. Linus is obviously a popular person and people (including women) will flirt with him.

I say this out of love, you need help with your paranoia.

Also remove this article, all you’re doing is making every single woman look like an enemy.”

——————————

Wow. Just Wow…

The evidence is overwhelming and self-evident, but only if leave your preconceived biased at the door. But let’s just dismiss all this and just paint it as “some innocent women just flirting with the man” Really? If you insult your own intelligence that’s your choice, do not attempt that on others. So thanks but no thanks.

So you, with your superior IQ, your highly developed intellect, are telling “out of love” to E.S.R., with a false appealing of affection (read typical female manipulation), that he needs help with a psychological disorder, you know, one of those that needs to be determined only by a professional treating the patient. (Not by any psychiatrist/psychologist, only by the one with the proper knowledge of the subject, after years of interviews and treatment.

Yeah, that was not a passive aggressive ad-hominem attack at all, that was just a medical evaluation from a concerned and innocent person…

And to top it all, this strawberry is just delightful:

“Also remove this article, all you’re doing is making every single woman look like an enemy”

So now you dictate to esr what he should do in his own damn blog, with the perfect blend of condescendence and bossiness only attained by third wave feminists. Bravo! you win my cookie of the day.

@Aaron “So now you dictate to esr what he should do in his own damn blog, with the perfect blend of condescendence and bossiness only attained by third wave feminists. Bravo! you win my cookie of the day.”

I propose we implement code in apache httpd to give every SJW a special diversity cookie to celebrate the unique snowflakeness of their special nature.

Then we can check for the cookie when serving web pages to protect those who have it from anything that might trigger them, like discussion of technology or free speech.

This problem is not limited to geekdom. I’ve seen essentially the same discussion in business and political forums, although the issue was usually framed in terms of how unfair it is to women that selfish men will not risk mentoring or being alone with them.

But given the climate, why would a man risk his career or marriage? Having sown the wind…

@TriggerFinger now that would be some poetic justice right there… if we could just get rid of so much hate and division, so much gender war with no meaning and no end, if we could code solutions to these bugs of society, or at least comment them out…

So much love is needed in the world, and so much brain power and energy is wasted in generating division and hatred… so sad indeed…

But I’m confident, as history as always shown, with courage to speak up and peaceful resistance, the good in our human nature will always triumph over the misery in our minds.

As has been mentioned the SJWs want to impose a Taliban type of society just with women running things instead of men. When civilization becomes incompetent and effete the weak-minded and evil flock to barbarism. We see it overseas and we’re seeing it in this country.

Jeff Read on 2015-11-04 at 12:16:18 said:
> The hilarious bit is that when they’re right, they get the sides wrong: the modernist
> movement in art, for instance, was recently revealed to be a CIA psyop!

To add to the list of professions where this happens, people I know told me years ago that doctor friends faced this accusation and had to always have a third person in the room from then onwards. I don’t know how common it is in the medical profession, but at least some doctors have also had to put in such safeguards.

This is indeed scary. It is, I think, a consequence of a change detected by Charles Murray a few years ago. Short version: gauged by political self-identification, all major population segments are centrist, moving slightly to the right, except “Intellectual upper class”, which has moved far out to the left over the last 40 years.

This is the segment of society that does the thinking for the whole. And they’re all going down a rabbit hole, and there’s no one to respond. The greater the mass of common thinking, the greater the pressure for uniformity, the less respect for dissent. This is a positive feedback loop that could take civilization over a cliff with it.

An analogy I thought of just recently: Japan in the 1930s. The men with the guns all went mad. They were convinced of their absolute rightness – and there was nothing to check them.

@William
“Dude, no one here thinks it’s a good idea. We just have other things we’re more worried about.”

But I think these are linked. It is the very same mind-set that destroys the lives of people when they are accused of being sexual predators when they transgress some byzantine Taliban rules of behavior. Whether it is the Sex offenders registry, the PC crowd, or the SJWs.

@Romeo Lovesauce: Me thinks I found a communist! After all, only a communist would worry about a fifth column… After all, it was the communist government in Madrid who were being undermined by the fifth column…
(A simplification of history that makes as much sense, if not more, as Romeo Lovesauce’s posts.)

Also, I was at one of ESRs dojos (not the current one) once. I was talking to him and his wife, when she had to do something else. As soon as she was out of the room, ESR pushed me up against the wall and kissed me forcibly! He then patted my bottom and said that no one would believe me and not to make a fuss. I was so shocked at what had happened that I then just left crying and never went back to that dojo, and gave up martial arts altogether for a time.

Moral of the story is: You don’t need to actually be alone with someone allege assault, and it doesn’t need to happen recently. If you really wanted to cause havoc, you could allege assault that happened some years ago (at a conference or otherwise).

ESR: Have you actually asked Linus straight out whether this allegation is true? If not, why on earth not?! It’s a shameful thing to say without this minimum of fact checking.

>ESR: Have you actually asked Linus straight out whether this allegation is true? If not, why on earth not?!

Haven’t, because I think the odds of getting an answer at all seem to me to be be very low. Linus does sometimes answer my mail, but has zero interest in borrowing the kind of political trouble talking about this would land him in.

To me, I look with big eyes on this situation.
Is is a speciality of the USA? of the American student scene? American IT scene?
.
I don’t hope that this silly behaviour of some silly fe,males will come also to (my) Europe.
But I fear it will: EVERY American fashion was copied here in the past, and we also have our handful of embarrssing feminists (degree of increase: gender megaphones, Gender-Troeten).

Personal experience: I work for a major tech company. On a project last year, a female consultant was padding her expense reports by up to $500 per week. Project Manager got suspicious and started asking questions. Next thing he knows, there’s a “hostile environment” complaint filed with HR for alleged sexist language, and his manager told him to drop the investigation because it could be construed as retaliation.

She’s still with the company, and has a leg up for promotions and avoiding layoffs for a couple years, because not giving her a promotion or laying her off could be called retaliation too.

This is common practice is almost every industry. Wise men never, ever allow themselves to be alone with a woman, unless a significant history and trust has been established. Doing otherwise is absurdly risky and stupid. Most women are normal rational beings. Some are not and have been taught that they can lie to get ahead. Some are terribly vindictive and may decide to destroy a man just because of some slight. Some believe every negative thing that happens to them is due to sexism and respond aggressively to everything. Wise, professional men have known this for years. Young men in youthful industries seem to think things are different now and since they are certainly not sexist and respect professional women, they can ignore this practice. They will learn the hard way.

“I’m going to take my source’s implied advice. And view “sexual assault” claims fitting this MO with extreme skepticism in the future.”

Rather than just refusing to come closer than 10 meters to any woman-in-tech. That’s why Ada Initiative’s followers and campaigns are successful: their male “victims” and their companions just don’t want to establish a professional attitude and refuse personal lures from anyone, instead they keep doing their attempts on women, and decide to ignore accusations against people presumably going too far.

Just apply their policy and wait until some women on conferences complain about a less familiar or personal atmosphere. Anyway, implicitly “excluding” women from working groups can now be reasoned by accusations of presumed sexual assault, disturbing a focussed and purposeful atmosphere of non-involved participants. One does not simply teach people to stfu, but it’s possible.

Thanks for answering my question. I’ll wait until this goes broader and Linus gives a response, to see whether it gets any more plausible.

But considering that claiming something bad happened some years ago is a more likely way of getting support (as people will have forgotten details, and might misremember reality with a little prompting), I doubt it …

I really can’t understand, why are some people opposed to this – I mean, even feminists say that it’s male privilege in tech to be able to have one-on-one conversations behind closed doors without fear of sexual assault, implying women are afraid to have one-on-one convos with men so they should actually love this (who cares about reasons anyway, end justifies the means) – http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Male_Programmer_Privilege_Checklist#Sexual_safety .

And to people saying that this is unfounded conspiracy theory – if programmers face dire consequences for joking between themselves when completely unrelated woman can hear them (Donglegate affair), only an idiot wouldn’t take precautions (and unlike some naive people speaking about recordings – unless you have recording on 24/7 , you’ll have never proof something didn’t happen when you were actually alone, so you’d better not have solo room at tech conferences)

Just want to point out that although you do have to watch out for feminist women, obviously, you have to watch out for their male friends too! After Paul Nungesser was cleared by his university tribunal, mattress girl got a MALE friend to accuse Nungesser of sexual harrassment/abuse. He got cleared of those charges too, but it’s a clear sign of what’s to come.

Can anyone tell me how – in principle – Ada is any different from Stormfront? What are Ada’s bona fides in regard to men as opposed to the KKK’s bona fides as opposed to black folks? If anyone did an analysis of the rhetoric of white supremacists and Ada would the lack of positive profilings of the targeted group be any different? I’m pretty sure both would be at 100% negative.

Holy fucking Hell, ESR. You’ve really been on the downswing for a good 15 years, now — basically, ever since Netscape opensourced Mozilla. But between this and blaming ACA for your financial ills… you have lost ALL credibility. Except, of course, in the anti-women conservative echo chamber. You must be so proud to be a story on Brietbart.

There was a time I cared about your opinion. I will now do my absolute best to show people just how mentally deranged you are. Some, I don’t have to, however; here’s a response to my posting your story, from thee BBS I’m on:

“Nov 5, 2015 10:23 from *****
Heh. Remember when ESR wasn’t a deranged narcissistic living joke at his own expense?
Me neither.”

So Eric Raymond is a bad guy because he doesn’t supply hard and fast proof, but for the poor schmuck who gets falsely accused? The accusation is enough to ruin his career. No proof required. And while it may seem unfair to apply the warning to all, remember you only have to trust the wrong person once to be screwed for life.

“Pastors and church leaders (the careful ones anyway) have had to follow this rule for a long time.”

My church went to the considerable expense of replacing all its classroom doors with doors having windows. The concern was accusations, false or otherwise, of child molestation, but the principle seems to be the same.

Part of what’s going on is that society is looking more malleable– Social Justice was simmering along in universities for decades, and then somehow it got out into the mainstream. (Anyone know how that happened?) I’m amazed that “white male” went from a neutral descriptor or even a default to a slur in less than a decade.

I’m not optimistic that we’re going to end up with anything amiable, but the current situation isn’t necessarily stable.

Back to the KGB guy– he made a weird claim that he could stay sober while pouring vodka into naive intellectuals because he had a pill. Anyone know anything about alcohol-nullifying pills?

More generally, it may be that this discussion is making me more cynical, but I’m listening to this charming fellow, and all the sudden it occurs to me that he’s saying “I’ve been lying my whole life, but now I’m telling you the truth”. He might be telling the truth, but I’d look for independent verification of what he says. Also, it might just be less embarrassing to admit you’ve been working for the bad guys than to admit that your organization is less capable than you thought.

Patrick off course it’s gone mainstream. In 2011 The Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Dept. of Education Russlynn Ali sent out the “Dear Colleague” letter basically extorting colleges into setting up a parallel legal system of kangaroo courts in cases of harassment and rape devoid of due process and legal representation or risk losing funding under Title IX. There is no doubt that was a result of this gender feminist movement lobbying for what I said earlier: if men aren’t breaking the laws then change them until they do. Such show trials carry no legal weight outside the colleges but can nevertheless break a career as surely as Ivy League anti-Jewish quotas could in the ’40s.

@Patrick Maupin: “Social justice” is totally mainstream, in the sense of widespread and unchallenged. Too bad Hayek’s critique did not demolish it decades ago.

If the anti-SJWs want to win, I’d say target that concept. As Napoleon said, destroy the enemy where he is strongest, and you’ve defeated him. Much of SJW ideology rests on “social justice,” and if that can be demolished, the whole edifice comes down.

Follow my father’s two simple rules of personal public conduct, and you won’t ever have a problem.

1. Appearance matters. It is not enough to conduct oneself properly in public. One must also maintain the _appearance_ of proper conduct.

2. Open door policy. Anyone could come to him for help at any time. But the door always remained opened. ( He was a professor.)

In 40 years of close contact with numerous female undergraduate and graduate students, he never had a problem. That lack of problems is notable because his program attracted young and mid-career women. Sexual harassment -in both directions- was an ever present issue.

I don’t see what is so terrible of expecting the public figures of the open source movement to adhere to the same code of conduct my father maintained for decades.

They are more likely to call the cops for illegal recording, having a recorder strapped to you falls under wiretapping in many states in the US.

I have an iPhone 6 Plus in my shirt pocket. The camera naturally faces outward, above the top of the shirt pocket. You have no way to know if I’m recording. And a complaint that I recorded without your permission, and thus defeated your false sexual harassment accusation, is not going to go anywhere.

“That was prior to the massive growth in women’s studies, gender studies, oppressed minority studies and so forth.”

That’s the key issue. Where are all these grievance studies graduates going to go? What is a certified Professionally Offended to do with their qualification? You train people to become parasites and guess what?

Their MO is to badger an employer about some manufactured grievance, get an apology, get a code of conduct, get an office of diversity set up to enforce it and finally get themselves hired as witch hunters to terrorize the staff that does the productive work for them to parasitize off of.

Yeah, mainstream– I remember Time magazine had a piece about colonialist elements in the movie Avatar. (The non-Airbender Avatar.) And there’s SJ elements on NPR.

The hard thing is that there are true parts of SJ. People really are bad at understanding that other people have different experiences,m and not just bad at it, but very apt to stubbornly insist that other people don’t have the experiences they say they have.. TriggerFinger’s parody about womansplaining wasn’t far off.

To my mind the big problem with SJ is that they believe their intentions are magic. People tend to judge themselves and people they like by their intentions, and people they don’t like by their results. For example, if a plane is shot out of the sky, you’re more likely to believe it was an accident if your government or an ally did it, and intentional if an enemy did it.

Glyer’s pathological liars have glommed onto our comments and declared us all women-hating MRAs. That’s funny since their daffy ideology declares the last 100 years of SFF literature, all of video gaming and the entirety of human history to be that anyway.

It’s amazing how many of them have never heard of Adria Richards, Shanley Kane, the UVA/Rolling Stone rape hoax, read Ada’s hysterical Geek Feminist timeline of sexual harassment, their own support for the #JustListen hashtag which basically does away with due process, the Mattress Girl hoax, factually examined their own lies about “rape culture” which also do away with due process and equal protection, their own cult’s comments which reduce profiling all men as potential rapists to be “hurt feelings” and “fee-fees,” the way they unilaterally enroll people into conservative and MRA movements they can’t prove with quotes, their daffy idea men default to privileged misogynists, their equally stupid and unsourced claims men feel “entitled” to woman’s bodies, the cab driver in the U.K. who only avoided prison because of attempted rape because his iPhone was recording, the lesbian at the U of Nebraska who faked her own assault, the nut at the U of Wyoming who faked rape threats, rape expert fantasy author Jim Hines own commitment to due process by Tweeting “Can’t we just throw Bill Cosby in jail already?” (paraphrased), colleges institutionally redefining “rape” as regret over a drunken one-night stand where only the man is at fault, and a hundred other things I could mention.

The days of declaring us all homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, racist, misogynists and pretending that is an argument are over. That ended when we found out your lies about “diversity” were nothing more than a cult which hates men, whites and heterosexuals and pretends a half-Irish, half-Arab “Muslim” guy who eats pork brought up in Detroit can write more “authentic” Arab fiction than a white Christian-America who has actually lived in the Middle East or that a half-Asian Parisian who speaks no Asian languages can write more “authentic” Asian fiction than a Polish guy who speaks a SE Asian language and has spent far more time there. Everything this cult says is a lie since it is a cult based on racism and supremacy and the idea knowledge is in the blood, a thing the KKK also believes.

Yeah, I know all that, and yeah, that’s bad, but no… co-opting part of government may be necessary to making it mainstream, but does not mean it’s mainstream. Cf. winter’s discussion about peeing in public and being on a sex offender registry.

@PapayaSF:

> … in the sense of widespread and unchallenged.

The parts that are widespread, _as understood_ by the mainstream, are IMO fairly innocuous. Social mores are one thing. I don’t think mainstream quite understands things like the subversion of the laws mentioned by James May yet.

@Nancy Lebovitz:

> insist that other people don’t have the experiences they say they have…

I don’t think that’s quite it. Mainstream assumes there is something else going on, as in “you must have asked for it.” The modern day equivalent of “Yeah, you got raped, but what were you doing walking on the street in that part of town at 3:00 AM?”

And this is why I’m wondering if it’s really “mainstream” yet. AFAICT, mainstream has not yet seen enough of this shit to say “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Assuming “Ken D’AMbrosio” is not a sock puppet, a little Googling reveals an appearance of years long antipathy for ESR. Any praise he has is expressed within that context (“I liked this one idea, but…”).

He doth protest too much, methinks.

(He would’ve done a much more persuasive job by arguing the actual points in lieu of an ad hominem.)

having a recorder strapped to you falls under wiretapping in many states in the US.

Where many is California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, some of them having various nuances. The others are one party consent states, if one party, that is, yourself, consents to the recording, you’re good.

This is one of the stupidest and most childish things I’ve ever read on the internet. Maybe you all should talk with some real liberals instead of having these imagined conversations with one dimensional straw men who only live inside your own head. But hey, if it makes you all feel good that you can defeat your own one dimensional ridiculous stereotypes of what feminism is about, go for it. But it’s wankery of the first order, and don’t mistake it for reality.

As I see it, Eric, your post is problematic; public discussions of this sort can lead to prejudiced behavior, and as “news” goes your post is not very helpful. The post doesn’t give specific answers as to which individuals are targeted (other than noting Linus has been targeted in the past,) which individuals are doing the targeting or which tech conferences are being targeted. Your report doesn’t mention when this plan is supposed to take place or what, in particular, is motivating these individuals. Is the motivation ideological? Is it financial? Is this a honeytrap being run by anti-OSS individuals/companies? In short, I don’t see much who, what, when, where, or why in your top post, though there is considerable speculation…

Your whole report might as well read “Sources say ebil feminazies plan to attack Open-Source luminaries, including Linus!” When I actually break it down, the whole thing is about as useful as a headline in the National Enquirer. Furthermore, while the report is very light on details, it does seem to be doing a great job – 200-plus posts later on this thread – of focusing suspicion and dislike on women in tech – and I don’t believe that this is your intent.

Eric, I believe that for all your faults you’re an honest broker and I trust your goodwill. I also believe this post is doing more harm than good.

IMHO, what your should have done is sent out a private email to anyone you see as being in danger, possibly including details you can’t discuss in public. This would make the warning more believable, more specific, and more useful. Following your non-public email, you should have kept your mouth shut.

Uh huh. You know, if you want to not be mistaken for an SJW memebot, “problematic” has joined the list of duckspeak words, along with “privilege”, “microaggression”, and “misogyny”, that you should probably avoid.

>IMHO, what your should have done is sent out a private email to anyone you see as being in danger, possibly including details you can’t discuss in public.

I don’t know what the entire list of people in danger is. Besides, I want to attack the public credibility of these advocacy groups – after repeated incidents like Donglegate and the scalping of Tim Hunt (who still hasn’t gotten his job back and is still being slimed in the press despite the record completely clearing him). They’re attacking my culture and my people and it’s long past time we took the war to them.

I wrote:
>They’re attacking my culture and my people and it’s long past time we took the war to them.

In case it’s not clear, none of this is about women in tech. Or minorities in tech. Or gays in tech. I’m exactly as libertarian as you’d expect on this – anybody who can pull the freight is welcome and twitching about things like skin color or shape of genitalia or what thing you like to stick into what thing is beyond wrong into silly.

What this is about is the SJWs’ attempt to fundamentally transform the hacker culture and STEM in general from an (imperfect, but honestly trying) meritocracy into a perfect hell-pit of identity-group politics, grievance-mongering, and rage-mobbing. Anything I can do to prevent that, I must.

Casey, what do “real liberals” know about feminism? Don’t you mean what do people who do research know about a given subject? Is there some PhD about feminism granted to liberals I am unaware of? I can’t speak for anyone else but my “ridiculous stereotypes” are based on 2 1/2 years of immersive research. If anyone knows more about the “feminism” promoted in video gaming, comics and SFF in the context of a comparative analysis of that ideology’s origins from de Beauvoir to Butler I’d like to know who the hell it is.

As for Troutwaxer, no one is focusing on a “dislike of women in tech.” We are focusing – not on sex and race as does this obnoxious ideology – but on actual individuals both male and female who self-define as members of this ideology in both their rhetoric and descriptions of themselves.

I agree that this post has struck a nerve with a lot angry people, and also served as a lightning rod for some ranting. However, venting can be therapeutic and the root danger is real, as evidenced by the examples cited (Eich, Hunt, etc). I don’t know how long you have been a regular at this blog, but Eric has a solid track record of getting these things right and would not have posted unless it was important and timely. A&D is not place for flame bait and the unintelligent do not hang around for very long.

Well, given that he’s still defending Obamacare, it’s pretty clear that he’s a hard-core cultist. Most of my liberal Dem voter acquaintances have taken to looking embarrassed and attempting to change the subject whenever Obamacare comes up.

Let’s see:

1) Doubling (or more) of the “affordable” premiums on the individual side.
2) Hundreds of millions of dollars blown on exchanges that (in some cases, such as Oregon) didn’t manage to enroll a single recipient.
3) A cost of $80,000 (!) per enrollee on the taxpayer side.
4) All this resulting in about the same number of uninsured individuals as there were under the last quarter of Bush II.

Defending a disaster of that magnitude is classic cult behavior. Thus, anything Ken says may be safely ignored.

This is all so very simple. Actual people like Adria Richards, Dave Futrelle, Shanley Kane, John Scalzi, Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian, N. K. Jemisin, attack men, whites and heterosexuals as an entire group. They do that in the fashion of classic hate speech: they transform that demographic into an ideology by creating demonization theories about “white privilege” and “rape culture” and then pretend to “critique” that entire group.

Any member of that racial and sexual group which pushes back against those real people with real names is deemed a racist, a transphobe, a homophobe, and a misogynist. In other words they lie and claim we do what they do.

I don’t see what is so terrible of expecting the public figures of the open source movement to adhere to the same code of conduct my father maintained for decades.

You really don’t understand.

We’re not talking about just “don’t take a girl into a private room”

We’re talking about people who – despite being willing to play cards against humanity in a semi-public venue – are willing to publicly shame people over a semi-private joke because she was offended. We’re talking about not getting on an elevator alone. We’re talking about having witnesses adn recorders 24×7. And even when there ARE witnesses – see Tim Hunt – people will lie to gin up offence against what you didn’t actually do.

It’s that, no matter how public, or how many witnesses, you will be attacked for what you said, what you said taken out of context, or even for something made up, and the simple rules you posit are NOT enough to save you.

You mean we shouldn’t teach women how to handle a “rape-me-not” (Glock, S&W, Ruger, etc.) so they can defend themselves?
Anecdote: I live in Wyoming and was out on a Sunday drive a few weeks ago and crashed my car in a washed out section of “not quite off the” road. Both responding deputies assumed I had a firearm – the conversation was interesting as they asked about “weapons”, until I said – “Do you mean a gun?” and I happened not to be carrying – this was an accident and they just were going to drive me back to an inhabited area, so it wasn’t like an arrest, they simply assumed I would have a gun. In the Equality State, it is strange NOT to constitutional carry, openly or concealed.

You come here, and expect us to “listen and believe” instead of believing our eyes and ears.

We’ve observed witchhunt after witchhunt, again and again, where accomplishments do not matter, hell, the very truth does not matter, but people will be damn well torn down and cast aside for simply having the “wrong ideas” – even if they really weren’t. (See “Tim Hunt”)

You’re full of BS. You dissemble about the nature of the conversations that are held here – but then what else would I expect from you? You declared your side, and we know how the sides behave. You certainly fit the bill. Way to go. Planning the party for the next “great leap forward”? Don’t plan too far ahead, the useful idiots are usually the next up against the wall along with the people who thought they were sufficiently faithful.

Chairman Mao would be proud. You’re finally going to get it “right” this time…

> Besides, I want to attack the public credibility of these advocacy groups

But that’s not what you are doing. You did not suggest any action regarding advocacy groups, you suggested avoiding being alone with all women. And your use of “collective guilt” implies [I think wrongly, but word choice is important] that you are framing it as a punishment (i.e. you want to punish all women) for the rather than as a pragmatic means to avoid being targeted.

I think at the very least you should never have made the aside about collective guilt, since this isn’t about punishing the (collectively or otherwise) guilty.

Ken D’AMbrosio on 2015-11-05 at 10:37:49 said: Holy fucking Hell, ESR. You’ve really been on the downswing for a good 15 years, now — basically, ever since Netscape opensourced Mozilla. But between this and blaming ACA for your financial ills… you have lost ALL credibility. Except, of course, in the anti-women conservative echo chamber. You must be so proud to be a story on Brietbart […] There was a time I cared about your opinion. I will now do my absolute best to show people just how mentally deranged you are […] Good riddance, sir.

Thanks Ken for a perfect example of the SJW smear template I mentioned previously. A copy of a copy of a copy, substance free, heavy on the demonization.

This is the kind of comment style that began the smear campaigns against Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens in the atheist community. A precise copy in fact. Zero substance, 100% accusation.

Sorry Kenny, these kinds of filth tricks have lost almost all of their efficacy. Time for you clowns to learn some new tricks.

So big deal Random. He’s suggesting a chaperone. Not exactly Jim frickin’ Crow. A hundred years ago chaperones were common. It wasn’t demonizing anyone any more than locking your house is demonizing anyone. We all know the climate in America has changed. Some college profs don’t close the door to their office when alone with students. Can you blame them? Blame the people who created this atmosphere, who, by the way, have names. Ada is one of them. If Tim Hunt can’t survive a lie in front of a crowd, who can survive a lie alone? It’s he-said, she-said and these people know it. The fact this is poisoning everything is precisely our point. If Jessica Valenti, John Scalzi and Shanley Kane were kicked to the side of the road we wouldn’t have this toxic atmosphere of irrational suspicions of which starts with the other side, not ours of women. Women are the greatest thing in the world. Left to my own devices I certainly wouldn’t be paranoid of them. But I would at a comic-con.

My wife (who has more technology degrees than me!) pointd out this discusseion to me, and I’m glad she did. You respected my opinion enough years back to add my guideliines to your “Luxury of Ignorance” essay, and I have to say, this his gotten me as cranky as the poor open source GUI problems you mentioned there. That essay was fun, partly because it covered very real issues. This blog post… isn’t even funny. No one else has a way to verify the claim with no names of open source leaders who’ve actually been accused or of their accusers, an “anonymous source” that no one else can verify, and a respected (if somewhat controversial) women’s political group that has already shut down. It smacks of the accusations made against political rights groups that I’ve been hearing for over 35 years. I have no doubt the suffragettes encountered similar tarbaby-like acusations.

In that 40 years time I’ve seen so many *actual* cases of harassment by men in power that sullying the waters with a poorly grounded and unverifiable claim of entrapment is poisoning the waters and discrediting the women who really are harassed and willing to report it. It’s disingenuous, especially considering some of the alternative reasons your “anonymous source” might have to make such a claim:

1) To discourage technology leaders from mentoring women without burdensome paranoia, thus hindering women’s technology careers.
2) To discredit claims of harassment so that your “anonymous source” will be believed when claims of entrapment are filed.
3) A “4chan” like desire to stir up trouble and muddy the waters, just for fun.
4) A “Black Adder” like “cunning plan”, to ensure that new women in technology are not otherwise engaged and thus more available for your “anonymous source” to find company among the younger, more vulnerable women as they go looking for company.

Don’t laugh too hard at that last one: I’ve actually seen variants of it throughout my education and my career. If you haven’t noticed it, try paying attention to colleagues who you *know* try to pick up the youngsters, students, or interns, and at how some of them officially discourage personal relationships but privately seek them out.

Do you meet many Bond villians who escaped from the theater where they were being shown in real life? I mean, seriously: what kind of nefarious personality are you proposing would set out to deliberately discouraging women in technology? I bet you believe the patriarchy is a real conspiracy with secret meetings, too.

“2) To discredit claims of harassment so that your “anonymous source” will be believed when claims of entrapment are filed.”

Or, you know, maybe the anonymous source was telling the truth and there are entrapment attempts being made. This is a kafkatrap: to warn about the existence of entrapment attempts in order to avoid them is taken as evidence of misbehavior,

“3) A “4chan” like desire to stir up trouble and muddy the waters, just for fun.”

If the source was actually anonymous to esr, this might be a concern, but as the source is known to esr, I suspect this possibility has been considered in light of that knowledge and rejected prior to the article being posted. Certainly I trust esr to be a serious person not willing to publicize such claims merely to stir the pot.

“4) A “Black Adder” like “cunning plan”, to ensure that new women in technology are not otherwise engaged and thus more available for your “anonymous source” to find company among the younger, more vulnerable women as they go looking for company.”

See my response to item one; it’s just a different movie the villains are escaping from.

And you wrap the whole thing up with generalized accusations of misbehavior that, being nonspecific, cannot be disproven… or proven.

In closing, “Nico”, I will note that I don’t know you from Adam, but you claim esr knows you and attempt to trade upon that past history. Maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t, but you’re commenting on a blog that allows anonymous comments. If I was esr, I wouldn’t take your claimed identity as a given.

Here’s your problem Nico: where’s this cunning male supremacist movement? Where are it’s gender studies classes enshrined in universities across America? Who is Intel giving money to? Anita Sarkeesian, not Roosh. Who is the Dept. of Education giving covering fire for? What goofball lesbian liberation ideology has sucked the life out of the Nebula and Hugo Awards, comics and gaming? What goofball lesbian liberation ideology has a JournOlist colluding to mass produce ideological same-page media articles in gaming? Are lesbian teachers and speakers being fired for remarks about men far worse than Tim Hunt’s joke? Unless you think Pearl Harbor in is Japan, you might want to reconsider your stance. There is anecdote and there is institution. There are bad people and there are bad institutions and ideologies. Stop running them together to make a point which doesn’t exist.

> This is a kafkatrap: to warn about the existence of entrapment attempts in order to avoid them is taken as evidence of misbehavior,

And to warn about the existence of harassers is taken as evidence of the sort of misbehavior of which such entrapment is an example. A sort of kafkatrap mexican standoff, that can only be resolved by choosing to not automatically believe either over the other.

@Random832: I beg to differ. Warning about the existence of harassers is a content-free, generalized accusation. It bears absolutely no relevant evidence, and I did not claim that it did. In fact, I specifically claimed that it did not. Further, I’m not accusing Nico of anything beyond particularly absurd movie villain fantasies and the use of a probably-unintentional kafkatrap.

I’m not actually accusing him of believing in a Patriarchy with secret meetings and decoder rings, just placing a side bet…

@ Random832: And your use of “collective guilt” implies [I think wrongly, but word choice is important] that you are framing it as a punishment (i.e. you want to punish all women) for the rather than as a pragmatic means to avoid being targeted.

I hadn’t noticed that aspect of Eric’s post, but I absolutely agree. This definitely does put Eric’s motives in question.

@ESR: “What this is about is the SJWs’ attempt to fundamentally transform the hacker culture and STEM in general from an (imperfect, but honestly trying) meritocracy into a perfect hell-pit of identity-group politics, grievance-mongering, and rage-mobbing. Anything I can do to prevent that, I must.”

Including inventing shadowy conspiracies, apparently. I would’ve thought that “a natural at Game” like yourself would be immune to this kind of attack, due to your amazing self-proclaimed ability to convince women that they want to have sex with you. /s
It’s interesting that you attempt to pass this claim off as concern for Linus Torvalds, considering that for all his assholeishness, I’ve never heard of him being creepy to women, whereas I’ve heard it many times about you over the years.
The one upside to this revelation of yours that it might make you less likely to creepily hit on married women at tech conferences in future.

>The one upside to this revelation of yours that it might make you less likely to creepily hit on married women at tech conferences in future.

Yeah, personal sexual accusation in 3…2..1 is part of what I’ve been expecting since this blew up.

Typical SJW tactic. It’s a complete lie, of course. The kind of lie that makes people afraid to speak out, because it’s not just damaging what it’s spoken, it’s predictable in advance – prospective intimidation. Alas for them that my reaction to attempted intimidation is to to punch back – now I’ll fight harder.

The next stage, if the SJWs decide to push it that far, will be the miraculous production of dozens of women who will claim I creeped on them. All lying, of course, but the really creepy thing is that some of them will actually believe it by the time they make the claim. Not out of conspiracy in the normal sense but because their politics has retconned their reality. ESR must be that kind of person, because only that kind of person fails to genuflect to the PC police, therefore he was creeping. All this is as predictable as sunrise; George Orwell would have understood it as part of the normal function of totalitarian ideologies.

And of course this has nothing to do with the issue at hand. I could have sex slaves chained in my basement and it would still be a completely different question of fact whether the heirs of the Ada initiative are trying to honeytrap opensource developers. So this is not just a character-assassinating lie, it’s an irrelevant character-assassinating lie.

But the people whom the treatment you suggested (whether that is avoiding mentoring or being in a room with someone, or actively disbelieving sexual harassment claims) should be applied to are all women, especially since you can’t know whether someone you meet actually is an activist member of such a group or not. The only thing left to interpretation is whether it’s intended as a punishment or pragmatic risk mitigation.

“fitting this MO” is, incidentally, an entirely vacuous statement, unless there’s something significant you’re leaving out about how you decide something fits the MO. Anyone who actually commits sexual assault is, obviously, going to do so when alone with their victim, so “accusations where the victim/accuser was alone with the accused” encompasses almost all sexual assault claims, true and false.

Are you being deliberately dense? When a SJW group pulls this kind of stunt it’s probably going to fit an obvious pattern. The identity and prominence of the target will be a major element. A “victim” with a long history of misandrist rhetoric and close affiliation with a (specifically third-wave, not second-wave) feminist activist group will be another. We can also expect no attempt to go to the police, as would be justified and expected if actual sexual assault had occurred. Very careful construction of the accusation so that the victim cannot produce facts or witnesses to refute it, too.

I should have said a more specific thing here. The alleged “victim” that fits the MO most closely would have a communications history full of kafkatraps. This is a leading indicator of the kind of ideological derangement that could make someone think it’s virtuous to ruin a man with false sexual accusations in order to advance the revolution.

@ esr: What this is about is the SJWs’ attempt to fundamentally transform the hacker culture and STEM in general from an (imperfect, but honestly trying) meritocracy into a perfect hell-pit of identity-group politics, grievance-mongering, and rage-mobbing. Anything I can do to prevent that, I must.

I understand your motives a little better now, (and I agree with your motives) but I have to say that your thinking is quite muddled. Let me illustrate with an example: You go to a tech conference and hear a slightly overweight, (10-15 pounds) but otherwise good-looking woman say, “I filed a complaint with HR because I’m stuck in a room full of Dew-guzzling brogrammers who alternately stare at my tits and give me “suggestions” for losing weight. The final straw was when I just got an anonymous dick-pic in my work email.”

So. Is this woman a horrible, evil SJW or does she have real problems with an unpleasant work environment? The simple fact of the matter is that you can’t know.

If you talk to her for an hour, do a careful investigation of her work environment, talk to the “brogrammers” she’s complaining about, and interview her bosses, you might have a good idea of what’s really going on. Or you might not. But what you’ve done in your top post is reduce the problem into an overly-simplistic, black-and-white, wholly ideological paradigm which doesn’t have a prayer of solving the real issues, whatever they may be. You’ve taken a gigantic, very complex set of issues and reduced them to a caricature.

In the real world… there are some very nasty feminists out there. I think the ideology has gone wrong in a major way,* and its ability to deal with real-world issues has deteriorated badly. People who make false rape complaints or complain inappropriately of “hostile work environments” shouldn’t be tolerated. People who encourage that kind of behavior shouldn’t be tolerated. Women with horrible social skills who screw up their relationships with co-workers then cry to HR… fire them.

On the other hand, there are some really rotten male bastards out there in the workforce and they shouldn’t be tolerated either. Dick-pic mailers, harassers, and ass-grabbers need to be quickly removed from any organization that wants to successfully continue.

The real world has both rapists AND women who falsely report rapes. It has both harassers and women with poor social skills who screw up their relations with co-workers then run to HR. It has women who misunderstand what it means to be a member of a strict meritocracy and men who pretend to run a strict meritocracy while actually harassing their subordinates… and the whole thing is inutterably complex while your point of view lacks any complexity. You might as well be screaming “Get off my lawn!” at every passing woman. That’s how your writing portrays you. Its disappointing and I think you can do a whole lot better than that.

And how do you apply this complexity to the problem you describe of “…SJWs’ attempt to fundamentally transform the hacker culture and STEM in general from an (imperfect, but honestly trying) meritocracy into a perfect hell-pit of identity-group politics…” I think you’ve got a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Let me correct/simplify it for you:

Assholes make everything worse.

Female assholes, the kind who make false harassment reports, make the STEM fields worse. Male assholes, the kind who harass women to make them leave STEM, or to get sex, make the STEM fields worse. When you discover an asshole of either sex, who follows any ideology, regardless of whether it is your own preferred ideology or one you hate utterly… cast them out of STEM. When you encounter someone with a legitimate complaint, whatever their ideology… help them out. When you discover a person who helps and mentors others, or uses their social skills to settle disputes, or is otherwise a class act, promote them within STEM regardless of their ideology. Reward good code, good science, and good behavior, and always, first and foremost, cast the assholes out!

*Essentially, I’m a second-wave feminist who has a mild tolerance for intersectionality. I think the third wave of feminism is pretty badly confused.

In the real world, people understand that a person’s choice of beverage is not sexism, that being a “brogrammer” (whatever that is) is not a firing offense, that “staring at my tits” is a pretty damned subjective thing to complain to HR about, and that “suggestions for losing weight” are similarly minor offenses that constitute little more than casual discussion to someone not focused on microaggressions. Sure, the latter too *might* be inappropriate in context, but they read like someone who is being hypersensitive to me. And the final straw? Your hypothetical complainer with her hypothetical anonymous dick-pic clearly doesn’t know anything about technology if she thinks that the email can actually be anonymous. THAT she is justified about complaining about, but I’d bet she sent it to herself.

Now, I can’t know that for sure until I look at the headers of the email. But that’s how I would bet. Why? Because no one has been sending dick-pics to random coworkers for decades in any reasonably professional environment, and the people doing that in the first place were about as far from “brogrammers” as could possibly exist. The people sending the dick pics are not the quiet nerds in the corner who are afraid of talking to women. And that this hypothetical woman begins by complaining about dew-drinking brogrammers only tells me that she probably doesn’t even know any actual programmers, just the straw ones in her head.

“On the other hand, there are some really rotten male bastards out there in the workforce and they shouldn’t be tolerated either. Dick-pic mailers, harassers, and ass-grabbers need to be quickly removed from any organization that wants to successfully continue.”

At one time in history, I am willing to believe that such people and such practices existed and were common amongst the particularly rude or powerful (see Clinton). I am not willing to believe that they still exist as a general practice, or that companies ignore such behavior to the point that it can persist without swift and sure legal action. There are always exceptions, of course; but I know which way I would bet on your hypothetical scenario… because I’ve seen real examples of feminist hate-mobs, and I’ve never met a “brogrammer” who would or could send a dick-pic. Be awkward, yes. Dick-pic, no.

I think your whole comment is an example of the false equivalence fallacy. Both sides are neither equally horrible nor equally common. Sexual harassment in the workplace is a problem that has been effectively solved, through the combination of legal penalties and absurdly overbearing HR departments, which is precisely *why* entrapment campaigns, microaggressions, stereotypes, lies (TIm Hunt), and donglegate are required to keep the issue in the news.

I’m not claiming it never happened in the past, or that it never happens now. I’m sure it does. But I can count examples and estimate probabilities when forced to deal in generalities. And when there is a specific incident, by all means investigate it.

Until then, men in tech should continue to exercise the precautionary behavior that has successfully reduced the number of real sexual harassment complaints.

@Troutwaxer: Oh, and one other thing. I don’t go around “casting people out” of STEM, or any other aspect of life. The police do that, after a trial, if the accused is found guilty of a criminal act; or the person’s employer may fire them, hopefully after an investigation and a fair hearing. If someone acts like an ass to my direct knowledge I’m not going to associate with them. But I’m also not going to engage in some sort of ritual excommunication and try to hound them out of the industry based on hearsay or rumor.

@Troutwaxer: I think you are missing the essential conflict between the “cast the assholes out” viewpoint and the SJW/cultural Marxism/intersectional/third-wave feminist view. The latter focuses on “patriarchy” and “cishetnormativity” and “the legacy of colonialism and slavery” and “rape culture” and “structural oppression” and so on. To an SJW, individual assholes merely express the social forces that are the real ideological enemy.

In the more traditional view, the individual is the focus, but that means boring, old-fashioned manners. The essence of “sexual consent classes” can be expressed in seconds: be polite, don’t force yourself on people, and don’t take advantage of them when they’re impaired or unconscious. Boom, you’re done. You don’t need classes or rallies or administrators or departments to express and enforce that. Ah, but to attack patriarchal misogynistic colonialist heteronormative oppression, you do. Scolding people about bad manners is square, but scolding them for vague political generalities is hip! And it can pay better, too.

Old-fashioned manners aren’t “progressive,” they’re the opposite: both more libertarian and more conservative. The original Progressive movements for prohibition and eugenics weren’t about personal responsibility regarding alcohol and reproduction, either. Progressives want to remake society as a whole, coercively, “for our own good.” Nobody can drink because some will get drunk. All men must attend consent classes, because some will be assholes.

I don’t think ESR or anyone else here is defending assault or even bad manners. They’re objecting to turning bad manners into a political issue and using it for leftist political power.

Women love drama, by their nature. It’s hard for us to imagine, because it’s not our nature. “It can’t be. That’s just misogyny…” Until it happens to you. Then you understand real quick.

More women in science and technology is more drama in science and technology. Ask Tim Hunt. You know, the Nobel laureate, decades at the top of his field. Literally hundreds of female scientists he personally mentored to success, not one of which defended him by the way. They took him down like a pack of lionesses.

Think you will fare better? Who the fuck are you in comparison? Some neckbeard.

You wanted women in STEM. You got it.”

This is some of the most small minded, ignorant bullshit I have read in a long, long time. To characterize > 50% of the worlds population from a single IRC conversation requires a particular type of narrow minded prejudice, one that can not be allowed to fester without some sort of rebuke.

>Am I the only one here who read this and thought about the Judean People’s Front muttering “splitters!”?

That would be unjustified. I could actually be described as a second-wave feminist – and on what I’ve seen of your behavior, you could be too. All that takes, really, is acting on the belief that women deserve equal rights before the law and equal opportunity in the workplace and other places people make choices.

The problem is that the divide between second-and third-wave feminism is blurry. What I’ve just described is a sort of idealized, clean version of second wave; other versions, especially as feminism evolved over time, became infected with toxic politics and galloping misandry until we got to the totalitarian memebot swarm that is SJW feminism.

Papaya is right, Troutwaxer; these feminists take a bad man and say they’re typical of men. And we’ve been warning people for years to stop trivializing harassment and rape to the point it throws a shadow on real harassment and rape. And now it’s actually happening. Remember, this cult actually thinks there are men in favor of rape. We do not say these crazed feminists are typical of women. We identify them by name and do not smear them onto 3.5 billion other women. That’s what this cult does for men and whites. That’s what rape culture and white privilege are designed to do. I have no ideological theories designed to smear all women and non-whites.

Here’s my attempt to come at the issue from a position that hasn’t been trodden over a hundred times:

My impression is that the alleged sexual assault and misogynist harassment cases that blow up in the media consistently turn out to be somewhere between downright false and lied about (Duke Lacrosse arguably being the canonical example) and princess-on-a-pea thin-skinned hypersensitivity and manufactured outrage (Adria Richards, Tim Hunt). Intuitively, one might think these cases are evidence that such falsehood is widespread. Surely if there were serious cases they’d be getting their slice of attention.

Slate Star Codex, in Toxoplasma of Rage, has a reasonable argument that this isn’t evidence because the media is run by clickbait not honest reporting, and is therefore incentivized to promote weak and false cases in the interests of lining up victim-supporters and evidence-believers against each other, cue outrage, cue attention, cue eyeballs and clicks. So any case you see in the media has been through such a strong selection filter that it’s nowhere near representative.

But I don’t think this is sufficient, because even if I were to be so cynical about the major media outlets that I’d assume absolutely zero honest reporting, I still wouldn’t say it’s all clickbait. There would be a large amount of activism too. When the activists wanting attention for (supposedly) victimized women keep promoting weak cases, this suggests that they either lack strong cases or they have factored truth out of their calculations. Either way, Eric is right that extreme skepticism is the correct response.

Are there counterexamples any here would suggest of sexual assault claims and the like that blew up in the media, were hotly disputed, and turned out to be true and serious? The closest that comes to my mind is the Lewinsky scandal, which is something of an odd duck in that I recall it mostly being prosecuted by the american right for partisan reasons against the american left, with “protect the women” playing a very distant second fiddle. (Which I assume is due to the left-alignment of vanguard feminism.)

>When the activists wanting attention for (supposedly) victimized women keep promoting weak cases, this suggests that they either lack strong cases or they have factored truth out of their calculations.

I think it’s actually weirder than that. As I pointed out earlier, a characteristic of totalitarian ideologies is that your politics retcons your reality. The activists take weak cases, inflate them in their own minds to strong ones because OPPRESSION!!! and are then genuinely bewildered when the cases fall apart. The weak case had become true in the reality in their heads, by a process of politically-driven self-deception.

That’s why a common sequel when one of these cases falls apart is to insist that it was true in essence if not in accident – that because OPPRESSION!!! we must all behave as though it was true. We heard a lot of this after the Duke Lacrosse case; more recently feminist talk about Emma Sulkowicz the mattress girl exhibits the same pattern.

Erik: that’s not quite right. Lewinsky was classic, real sexual harassment of exactly the type that most workers in the US have to attend “training” about every year. If my boss had done that to any of my female peers, he would rightfully have been fired and likely imprisoned.

The media, being leftist activist, followed Hillary’s lead (“vast right wing conspiracy”) in claiming the only possible objection to Bill’s behavior was for partisan reasons. At which point the media was flooded with now infamous pieces by female journalists and non-academic feminists claiming basically that if you vote Democrat you are immune from sexual harassment because abortion on demand for the collective trumps the feelings of individual women.

“So this is not just a character-assassinating lie, it’s an irrelevant character-assassinating lie.”

Actually, it’s not irrelevant, it’s pretty much an absolute proof of the point of the post, since if Nop (accompanied by a couple of those “victims”) could complain to your HR department they could probably get you fired.

What was Mattress Girl’s first instinct when no one believed her? Find a couple of friends to make additional accusations…. just like this clown.

Worth noting that PZ Myers who is himself something sort of a leftie/feminist/SJWish man, wrote some time ago on the Pharyngula blog that he no longer sees it safe to be alone with a female student or coworker. Can’t find a link, maybe when I will have more time I will dig it up.

The point here is that this sounds utterly crazy, but even if one of THEM feels unsafe about things like this, well.

Don’t know US legislation on this but if it is okay there, just put a camera in your office so that you can still have a chat with a female employee without a ridiculous chaperon. It would be gold to get accused, and use the footage to not only defend yourself but hit back with false accusation or defamation or something.

The whole story makes me more comfortable with CCTV “surveillance society” stuff and at some level I even wonder if that is the goal. If I was a “conspiracist” trying to sell that, I would try to make people fear privacy…

“I could actually be described as a second-wave feminist – and on what I’ve seen of your behavior, you could be too. All that takes, really, is acting on the belief that women deserve equal rights before the law and equal opportunity in the workplace and other places people make choices.”

Perhaps, but I refuse to adopt the term for the same reason I refuse to say the words “black lives matter”, even though I firmly believe that all lives, black included, matter: it puts me in league with wackos, crazies, and SJWs (but I repeat myself).

>Perhaps, but I refuse to adopt the term … it puts me in league with wackos, crazies, and SJWs

Fair enough, and I won’t argue with your reasons. But the issue here is not how you describe yourself but whether Troutwaxer’s distinction between second and third wave is meaningful and relevant to the discussion. It is, and you were wrong to invoke that Monty Python sketch at him.

@ESR: “Yeah, personal sexual accusation in 3…2..1 is part of what I’ve been expecting since this blew up.”

I think you posted this ridiculous conspiracy theory because you hit on the wrong person & they threatened to ‘out’ you in public, so you are doing this to pre-empt any accusations. Fact is that you made a pass at my close friend’s wife at a FOSS event. The sad thing is that you’ll probably get away with /that/, but the day will come when your behaviour catches up with you.
Have you ever considered just sticking with your wife & treating other women as peers, rather than as potential ‘conquests’?

>Fact is that you made a pass at my close friend’s wife at a FOSS event.

Fascinating. I’m left wondering whether this is a conscious lie or whether Nop is yet another one of those creatures whose politics has retconned their reality. It doesn’t actually matter in any real sense, but I’m morbidly curious.

Er, to be fair to Nop, I guess there is at least one other possibility. Just once, at a conference in 1999, I recall a woman I didn’t even recall meeting believing that I had groped her. I don’t actually think she was lying, I think she had me confused with someone else. Because, you see, she also thought I was drunk at the time, and I never drink. The least hypothesis I could form was that she was drunk and had honestly fingered the wrong guy. There is an outside chance of an honest mistake here.

On the other hand, one of the ways you can spot fake harassment accusations is the way they fail to emerge until well after the alleged incident, at a time when it becomes politically necessary for the target to be discredited. Nop, dude, you’d be more credible if you had come at me out of the blue rather than just after I’d posted what amounted to an expose that would piss off a lot of feminists. People have seen this movie before; the tactic is getting old.

Isn’t that in itself a negative stereotype? I mean, what useful information do someone’s soft drink consumption habits carry beyond that trying to stick him into a generally low-prestige stereotype and thus make an accusation more believable? This alone would move it from 50% to 60% that the accusation is false. It is a very very old tactic that presenting people as low-prestige makes it easier to believe they do unethical things. And always suspicious, because when people have real evidence they don’t need to do this. Putting it differently, real victims are usually far too upset to really frame things so carefully.

The funniest part is that even on the average, I don’t think the “basement dwelling Dew guzzling neckbeard” stereotype is even more likely to be rude to women, I think they are more of the pedestalizing or white-knighting type. You know all the tip my hat to m’lady jokes on reddit. It is an entirely different story. His problem is that he is both unattractive as fsck and often awkward, so when he tries flirting women get disgusted (for real, as in: foul breath, totally happens) and if the poor loser found a feminist, a feminist usually thinks like most liberals that other people are responsible for her own emotions and therefore figures her rights were violated by forcing her to get disgusted by that foul breath or something. Hence the neckbeards-are-sexist stereotype. Usually they are falling over themselves to be m’ladys most faithful chivalrous knight. (Which is something feminists call benevolent sexism, so they can never win, but anyway, the point is that that stuff does not lead to harassment.)

@Erik&Ian
“The closest that comes to my mind is the Lewinsky scandal, which is something of an odd duck in that I recall it mostly being prosecuted by the american right for partisan reasons against the american left, with “protect the women” playing a very distant second fiddle.”

The Lewinsky case had nothing at all to do with sexual harassment. Lewinsky fell in love with her boss and they had consensual sex. There has never been even a suggestions that either had any misgivings about their affair. Then others started to harass them over it. In a classical move, the Boss betrayed hiss mistress and dropped her when things started to become serious.

There are jurisdictions where it is illegal to have sex with an employee (I believe ao Germany). But that is a different matter.

Nop, if Eric’s such an eeeeevil creepy rapist, how come no woman has come forward to denounce him herself before now? Surely, in today’s environment, they would feel emboldened to do so, perhaps even more than with the average run-of-the-mill scientist or politician. After all, he’s widely hated around the FOSS world and has been since long before this post.

No, sorry. I don’t buy it. Just as the woman mentioned earlier who had an investigation terminated by raising an accusation of harassment is now insulated from getting fired or not getting promoted because retaliation, so, too, is Eric. That sword cuts both ways.

>Nop, if Eric’s such an eeeeevil creepy rapist, how come no woman has come forward to denounce him herself before now?

Wait! Wait! I know the answer! They’re all intimidated by my social power. Or something. I have no doubt there’s an entire volume of volk-Marxist gobbledegook for this. Um, they’ve internalized their oppression? Yeah, that’s a nice catch-all phrase.

One reason I’m treating Nop’s theory that I’m trying to pre-empt an outing as unintentional humor is that, er, I didn’t go to any FOSS conferences between 2004 and 2015. Unless you count Penguicon – and, Jay, as you well know, if I made a pass at a married woman in that social environment, “outing” me would generally be considered rude and almost taboo behavior. It’s true I went to FOSSCON 2015 earlier this year, but there was barely a female in sight there and I am quite, quite sure that no making of passes occurred.

Jeez. The last time I had a sexual interaction with a woman not my wife, she stuck her tongue down my throat and I fled in embarrassment. Oh yeah, I’m a total creep-ball. Lock up your wives and daughters, ESR is coming!

WInter: “The Lewinsky case had nothing at all to do with sexual harassment. Lewinsky fell in love with her boss and they had consensual sex.”

The feminists claim that this must be sexual harassment, because the power imbalance renders any consensuality meaningless (and it’s hard to get a bigger power imbalance than the president of the US vs. an intern!). That is, they claim such situations must be harassment except when Bill Clinton is involved.

That’s why a common sequel when one of these cases falls apart is to insist that it was true in essence if not in accident – that because OPPRESSION!!! we must all behave as though it was true. We heard a lot of this after the Duke Lacrosse case; more recently feminist talk about Emma Sulkowicz the mattress girl exhibits the same pattern.”

That’s not just for sexual assault cases. I’m forcibly reminded of Dan Rather’s career ender: Apparently the man still believes in “fake but accurate”…

What? I didn’t say the anonymous source was a part of a supremacist movement, or *cunning*. If you’ve never seen “Black Adder”, the “cunning plots” were of this sophistication:

>> Lord Edmund Blackadder: Baldrick, you wouldn’t see a subtle plan if it painted itself purple and danced naked on top of a harpsichord, singing “Subtle plans are here again!”

Separately: do male supremacist groups exist, and cause trouble? The “sad puppies” who helped poison the Hugo Awards last year are an example. They’re hardly cunning, but they did interfere with the careers of non-white-male writers who should have gotten well-earned Hugo awards. Look it up, please: I couldn’t possibly have invented them. And their behavior is public, traceable, and signed: it’s not vague accusations from an unidentified “anonymous source” about assertions for which there is not a single witness listed.

>The “sad puppies” who helped poison the Hugo Awards last year are an example. They’re hardly cunning, but they did interfere with the careers of non-white-male writers who should have gotten well-earned Hugo awards

Uh huh. I’m sure you believe that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and we have always been at war with Eastasia, too.

@ESR: “just after I’d posted what amounted to an expose”
Your ‘exposé’ is just a pre-emptive strike to establish plausible deniability – at least with the kinds of people who believe in bizarre conspiracy theories. Everyone else will see it as the joke that it is, of course, just as they do when a child claims that the dog ate their homework.

There is a slight confusion of terms here. Third wave and intersectional are the same thing. Second wave embraces both lesbian and equal rights feminism. Therefore the second wave is white feminism. The second wave is generally considered to last from Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique to Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. “Intersectionality” was coined by the black activist Kimberle Crenshaw a couple years later.

But to make it more confusing, the concept of “intersectionality” has been implicit though not emphasized in lesbian feminism since the beginning and especially when Audre Lorde came onto the scene in the ’70s. The concept is simple: a black lesbian is more oppressed than a white lesbian is more oppressed than a heterosexual woman; there are “intersecting” vectors of oppression. When Audre Lorde spoke of white feminists as being “tools of the patriarchy” in 1979 that is in fact the concept of “intersectionality.”

For me the sole divider is I support equal rights feminism 100%. I reject gay second/third wave feminism as nothing more than a racist, sexist, supremacist cult created by mentally ill sociopaths; it is a diversity arm of the KKK in all but name. It has a phobia of men, whites and heterosexuals that is irrational.

Eric, what’s the etiquette here when someone backs up their argument by citing a tempest in someone else’s teacup? I disagree with Nico regarding the Sad Puppies, but trying to explain why would risk a long digression into a subject that’s previously attracted multiple shitstorms, in a thread where it seems tempers are already running high. I don’t want this to blow up into the Mark Five Standard Endless Internet Argument, but it also seems Nico deserves a reasonable debate rather than being ignored since he’s offered evidence for his position.

(Attempt at a short answer: Sad Puppies is currently run by three women: Amanda Green, Sarah Hoyt and Kate Paulk. Some male supremacist movement, eh?)

@ESR: “Unless you count Penguicon – and, Jay, as you well know, if I made a pass at a married woman in that social environment, “outing” me would generally be considered rude and almost taboo behavior.”
So am I correct in thinking that you believe that it’s 100% okay to make passes at women at Penguincon, regardless of the circumstances?

>So am I correct in thinking that you believe that it’s 100% okay to make passes at women at Penguincon, regardless of the circumstances?

You meant this as a baiting question, but I’ll give a serious answer because I think my other readers will find it of interest.

In convention fandom it is generally understood that lots of people are poly. Random guy X making a pass at random girl Y is no cause for scandal at all, and the marital status of either is pretty much irrelevant – people generally consider it’s none of their business unless one party won’t take no for an answer or the other party is drunk to the point of incapacitation (which is rare – fans are often hearty drinkers but it’s not within social norms to get that plastered).

But that relaxation doesn’t mean it’s “100% OK”. It’s just as out of bounds to make a pass at someone who is married and declared mono as it would be anywhere else. One of the things that made me uncomfortable about this incident is that the woman came on to me stronger than she really should have without knowing whether I’m mono or poly. That she was drunk at the time is only partial excuse – it was a breach of manners which I’m sure she found embarrassing later.

Reread that last sentence. It contains, or at least implies, the answer you’re looking for. If you’re actually interested in the truth, which I doubt.

>If he says nothing, or even denies it, it’s because he’s just afraid to speak out. And this is somehow not a kafkatrap.

No. Remember the non-falsifiability requirement. There are lots of reasons for Linus in particular to not get into this fight that don’t involve fear, and I won’t blame or criticize him if he doesn’t. I’m sure you can think of a few yourself.

And, frankly, I don’t need him to confirm. It would be one thing if Linus said “No, I don’t believe I’ve been targeted,”, in which case my source is wrong and my trust is misplaced, game over. As it is, the SJWs have done an excellent job of making my source’s allegation more than 50% credible without Linus’s help. Ask Tim Hunt about that.

That’s not an M.O. That’s you creating a class of people who you think should be allowed to get away with anything because no-one should believe accusations against them. Maybe most wouldn’t take advantage of that position, but all it takes is one.

> Very careful construction of the accusation so that the victim cannot produce facts or witnesses to refute it, too.

Most people who commit crimes try to avoid evidence or witnesses too. This piece therefore provides absolutely no useful information for distinguishing a false accusation from a true one, since in both the bad actor has an incentive to arrange things that way.

>They’d be such fools not to recruit someone without such a (visible) history to play the role of “victim”, that I’d automatically assumed this was absolutely not part of the M.O.

I actually think they often are that stupid – or, which amounts to the same thing, that ideologically blinded.

Besides, let’s get real. Who are they going to find to run an entrapment who isn’t so bought in to anti-male ideologizing that she can’t help being obvious and strident about it? I grant you that an exception is theoretically possible, but it’s not the way to bet.

I honestly have no use for any MRA or male supremacist movement in any culture. The problem is that straight white men are simply profiled as defaulting to that. You don’t have to read a lot of Shanley Kane, Adria Richards or the Ada Initiative to understand that. Supremacy is a neutral concept and one could easily detect the institutional presence of such an ideology regardless of the race or sex promoting it. There is massive documentation of such a feminist ideology institutionalized in tech, comics, gaming and SFF. There is no documentation of an institutionalized male version.

Remember, in the case of SFF for example, the entire era 1912-70 is said to default to the equivalent of an ideological homophobic, misogynist KKK, though there is no same-page rhetoric that exists to back up that claim. During those six decades you can’t find five male SFF authors on such a same supremacist ideological page. However in tech, comics, gaming and SFF I can easily find a feminist version of such ideologues with no trouble at all. And they are institutionalized by way of hearings at the U.N., given Intel money, speaking at a wide variety of neutral conferences, given credibility by the HuffPo, Salon, Gawker Media, The Guardian, etc.

> Most people who commit crimes try to avoid evidence or witnesses too.

Between crimes of passion in the heat of the moment, grudge-driven avengers who don’t care if they’re caught, self-perceived untouchables who figure they’re immune to prosecution, ignoramuses who don’t realize that they’re committing a crime, and drunken fools who don’t consider the consequences of their actions, I wouldn’t count on that.

“So am I correct in thinking that you believe that it’s 100% okay to make passes at women at Penguincon, regardless of the circumstances?”

Nop, I’ve been to every Penguicon since the first. (Eric has too, IIRC.) How many cons do you know of that have, as a staple of the lineup, a panel on “Flirting for Geeks”?

Flirting is absolutely part of the culture at Penguicon. So is turning people down. Neither is considered any big deal. It’s not quite to the level of, say, a Renaissance faire, but it’s not your average tech conference, either.

One of the ribbons you can get near the registration table is one with a series of letters on it, and an instruction sheet. The letters signify what forms of interaction you’d like, and you cross out the ones you don’t (with a supplied Sharpie). Simple and effective.

And even that con is being slowly SJWized. There were posters on “consent culture” all over the damned place, including the inside front cover of the con book. I did manage to get the Board of Directors’ and the current and next year’s con chairs’ attention enough about it to get invited to think up alternatives. (As well as invited to submit a series of panels, in response to my complaints about panels on gender and similar claptrap. Eric, I’d like to discuss that with you sometime offline.)

>One of the ribbons you can get near the registration table is one with a series of letters on it, and an instruction sheet. The letters signify what forms of interaction you’d like, and you cross out the ones you don’t (with a supplied Sharpie). Simple and effective.

As Jay says. The purpose of these ribbons is to avoid the kind of breach of manners Honey committed when she tongue-kissed me without knowing my mono/poly status. I don’t remember if I was wearing one at the time; I think I was not. When you don’t see a declaration like that, good manners is to ask, either directly or by a leading question, well before you get to the point of trying to swap fluids.

I am amazed at the violence of the reaction by “Ken D’AMbrosio.”
ESR hit a nerve, it seems.

@ESR. Either (1) your article is factually wrong and no harm has been done to nobody, or (2) it is factually correct and you have been of service to the community by bringing this concern to light – and thank you for that.

A few months ago, I have been assaulted on line by several of these self-styled ‘feminists.’ Believing in a casual discussion at the beginning, I needed time before I realized these persons did not care one bit about who I actually am and what I actually thought and how I felt : they were having a go at me ONLY on the basis of my (MALE) GENDER !! A behavior both reason and education forbid me to have toward a woman or anybody, by the way… Following this event and others, I did further researches and I now believe _contemporary_ militant ‘feminists’ active in Western societies ARE mentally deranged persons. These women should see a shrink, not ‘defend a cause.’ Given that I have no difficulty believing the story in the article.

What if it never really ended? A little monetary support within these circles and then wind them up and then they can stand back and watch it play out. I half kid, but as we know “follow the money”.

I was thinking about the disproportionate nature of these attacks by “victimized” groups and how it’s like DDoS, spam, or fishing. These attacks work on the sheer difference in effort. A group comes in and attacks an established community with insinuations or lies. Literally insulting years of work of one, or hundreds, of people and all it takes is a few carefully cut “sound bite” replies to be taken out of context to keep the attack going and the only way to stop it is to capitulate ( sometimes they just get bored ). The fact is it takes a hack only minutes to craft a comment that will elicit the response they need. Hacking the human condition for malicious ends.

Maybe we need some whitehat hacking of the human condition rather than take the reactionary path which, more than likely, is just playing into their hand.

@esr
>You’re both being dimwitted. The “Ladies” was the women in the activist groups, not “all women”. As I’ve already explained once.

It doesn’t matter what you meant; what matters is what the Left can twist your words into meaning.

You really ought to meet Jeff Goldstein, who has written extensively on this Leftist tactic.

In short, “Who are you to tell us what you meant, you [raaaaacist|sexxxxxist|homophooooobic] knuckle-dragging Neanderthal? WE KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY MEANT!”

Thus does a sports writer who wrote of Jeremy Lin’s slump as “a chink in his armor” lose his job, because Mr. Lin is of Chinese extraction. Anyone else previously seen as supreme who shows weakness can have a chink in their armor, but not Lin or Yao. It doesn’t matter whether the writer even knew that word had the meaning ascribed to his writing. The privileged interpretive community hath declared him guilty of DoublePlusUngoodThink.
.

What bothers me here is how Nop is using consciously ambiguous language. Not ESR, but some other men surely flirt with women at conferences as not all men are married, and it is perfectly normal. Now: making a pass, according to the Urban Dictionary:

“Someone getting at another, starting a conversation and flirting in order to get it in later
-“hey, there was this cute girl talking to me earlier but she left”
-“yea she was trying to make a pass”
-“dammit! My game sucks” ”

The truly alarming part is the conscious effort to blur the boundary between flirting / attempting a pick-up vs. harassing. Meaning basically the only safe way for a man to behave with women is to show no sexual interest.

Okay, so what would be the SJW code of conduct? Only women are allowed to initiate flirting? Only non-balding handsome men are allowed to initiate flirting? Or skip it at the conference and wait for the party after? (Actually perhaps this latest rule would make sense.)

Or there is no such thing, it is just consciously formulated a weapon, not an actually functional new etiquette?

And, pray tell, what was the point of the whole Sexual Revolution if this is the result, that flirting and going for _consensual_ conquests (again not ESR but others surely do, there are lots of single guys out there) is now somehow bad? Let’s just go back to arranged marriage then or some other old stuff. Men – most men – have nothing to win from a world that allows sexual libertinism for women yet polices the attempts of men. In fact, for most men, the arranged marriage world was far easier.

The point I am trying to tell that all this basically reduces to expecting men to accept something against their own interests, just out of some moralistic stuff. Sexual freedom for women and sexual freedom for men is precisely the worst possible outcome for most men. Freedom for both genders at least liberates the cads, no freedom for either gender makes being a dad easy, but this arrangement helps almost no man.

Nop, what are you selling to men, exactly? What is in it for us? I mean actual interests, not moralistic stuff.

, he says in the same breath as making excuses for why his claim isn’t falsifiable without the cooperation of someone whom he makes excuses for not doing so. I think that a claim for which there is no evidence either way, and is supported only by a mere assertion about which belief we should default to, should not be treated with any more respect than a truly unfalsifiable claim.

> Flirting is absolutely part of the culture at Penguicon. So is turning people down. Neither is considered any big deal.

Doesn’t this make it an unwelcoming environment to people to whom it is a big deal, therefore having a tendency to exclude those people?

I don’t necessarily agree (though I think it’s a more complex issue than a lot of people on both sides want to make it), but I certainly understand people’s dislike of the idea of such a thing being woven into the culture of something that isn’t about that (and therefore for which there doesn’t exist a good substitute for people who are uncomfortable in such an environment). Flirting being okay at a singles bar is one thing. Flirting being okay at conventions means that people not comfortable with flirting can’t go to conventions.

>. I think that a claim for which there is no evidence either way, and is supported only by a mere assertion about which belief we should default to, should not be treated with any more respect than a truly unfalsifiable claim.

I consider my source’s report to be very strong evidence. I can’t tell you why without putting him at risk, but that doesn’t change my evaluation. I can much more easily live with your disbelief than with his career being destroyed.

>Flirting being okay at conventions means that people not comfortable with flirting can’t go to conventions.

I dunno. I think it’s entirely possible to go to a con and barely notice that level of it, or select venues so you’re not uncomfortable. Nobody’s very likely to flirt with you in a program room (well, not unless it’s a panel on a sex-related topic or flirting); the con suite or a room party is a different matter.

Nop: “I think you posted this ridiculous conspiracy theory because you hit on the wrong person & they threatened”

When, exactly, did “hitting on” someone become a crime? “Hitting on” (which, of course, comes in a really wide spectrum of degrees of subtlety) is how ALL sexual relationships are initiated. “Hitting on” is not the same thing as harassment.

>When, exactly, did “hitting on” someone become a crime? “Hitting on” (which, of course, comes in a really wide spectrum of degrees of subtlety) is how ALL sexual relationships are initiated. “Hitting on” is not the same thing as harassment.

To be fair, Nop’s original formulation was “made a pass at”, which is socially a lot more serious and more likely to give offense even if it doesn’t rise to the level of criminality. I don’t feel any need to pick nits in his claims at that microlevel, so you shouldn’t bother either. Whether it’s “pass”, “hitting”, or “creeping”, the substance of the accusation is the same – that I’m inventing a conspiracy theory to shield my own behavior.

Meanwhile, offstage, the women I’m actually close to are probably having trouble maintaining their indignation because they’re laughing at the poor schmuck so hard. “He don’t know him vewy well, do he?”

So, you have a rumor from an anonymous source, and 0 facts|confirmation. How very scientific of you, Eric. Yes, you have guessed our ruse! As a woman who has worked in tech for over 2 decades, I look forward to going to conferences not to talk to colleagues about the latest ways to detect honeypots, but to be one! It’s the only way to advance my career with my measly girl brain. BWAHAHAHA.
(Sigh)

esr on 2015-11-06 at 06:06:23 said:
“I think it’s actually weirder than that .. The weak case had become true in the reality in their heads, by a process of politically-driven self-deception.”

It’s even weirder than the weirder.

Feminists had a civil war in the 90s between equity feminists, ie normal women, and gender feminists, ie radfem male hating cuntists. At the time the leadership of NOW and other mainline feminist organizations uniformly consisted of unmarried childess lesbians who held open contempt for the concerns of mothers and wives; better to focus on antagonising males and the traditional family instead. In opposition, the equity feminists broke off to form separate organizations and..

.. went nowhere and lost the intra feminist civil war.

Victorious, gender feminism became third wave feminism, transforming itself into the industrial scale manipulation of women for the purpose of melding them into unwitting human shields for the anti-male, anti-family lesbianist agenda.

A modern feminist that does not expressly identify as an equity feminist is either a covert lesbianist pushing anti-male hatred or a human shield useful idiot, ie, one engaged in the “politically-driven self-deception” you identify. There are two groups and the lesbianist core is the one feeding the deception.

The deception being that third wave feminism is about women, whereas the truth is that it’s about lesbian penis-envy driven pyschosexual frustration. This core source of anti-male rage can’t express itself directly and all manner of fantastic rape this rape that pretexts have to be shovelled in to keep the truth hidden and the ideological shamble going.

TheDividualist on 2015-11-06 at 06:55:30 said:Worth noting that PZ Myers who is himself something sort of a leftie/feminist/SJWish man, wrote some time ago on the Pharyngula blog that he no longer sees it safe to be alone with a female student or coworker. Can’t find a link, maybe when I will have more time I will dig it up.

1) PZ Myers is the walking embodiment of all SJW corruption
2) PZ Myers has himself been subject to at least one serious charge of sexual abuse

He is possibly the vilest, most morally destitute individual I have ever encountered. And a prime mover of ‘social justice’ online and in STEM, skepticism, atheism. He also made a Herculean effort to dox me and destroy my family and work relationships, including dick thwapping threats to get me placed on “no fly lists” with Interpol and FBI. Search his site for my nick. I had dozens of concurrent hate posts happening a few years ago. Because I laughed and called him a charlatan/snake oiler.

@Random832:
>> Flirting is absolutely part of the culture at Penguicon. So is turning people down. neither is considered any big deal.
“Doesn’t this make it an unwelcoming environment to people to whom it is a big deal, therefore having a tendency to exclude those people?”
Good question. What I’m wondering is whether women are made aware in advance that by attending Penguincon, they implicitly agree to being hit on, & lose their right to complain when someone gropes them. Prior to today, I’d certainly never heard of Penguincon having a policy that could be interpreted this way.

>Good question. What I’m wondering is whether women are made aware in advance that by attending Penguincon, they implicitly agree to being hit on, & lose their right to complain when someone gropes them.

The stupid, it burns.

Who said anything about groping being acceptable? For all that many of them are a bit socially impaired, fans generally know better than that. I’ve been in fandom for over 30 years and only know of a handful of such incidents.

And who said women (or men) that matter, implicitly agree to be hit on by showing up? I have to quote Charles Babbage here: “I am unable to apprehend the confusion of ideas that could give rise to such a question.”

Oh look, it turns out that Penguicon /does/ have anti-harassment rules:http://2015.penguicon.org/code-of-conduct/
[Partial:]
Code of Conduct
Harassment
Penguicon is committed to fostering an environment of comfort and safety for everyone, regardless of gender, sexuality, relationship status, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, national origin, or religion. We will not tolerate any form of harassment of convention participants. Con participants found to be engaging in harassment may be expelled from the con without refund and/or banned from future attendance.
What is harassment?
Harassment includes:
making offensive verbal comments, facilitating an unwelcoming environment, or preventing any attendee from entering or participating in con events based on gender, sexuality, relationship status, impairment, physical appearance, body size, race, national origin, or religion
showing sexual images or conducting discussion about sexual topics in public spaces when the images or discussions do not allow attendees the opportunity to leave beforehand or are not presented in a respectful manner
intimidation, stalking, or following
photographing or recording someone without their consent
sustained disruption of talks or other events
* uninvited physical contact
* uninvited sexual attention
—
So Eric, perhaps you should explain to them how they’re misinterpreting the rules you say they have?

1. It seems to me that the ribbons explicitly stating you intentions is a great solution to the problem. (The primary problem here being that women are under immense social pressure to be the Virgin Mary, and so there is a considerable pressure against them admitting they are open to flirting, irrespective of their level of horny.) But for honest people I think it is awesome. And who the hell wants to flirt with dishonest, non self aware people anyway?

2. Imagine a place you like to frequent — a local store, club, theater, a park, a web site or whatever. Imagine a gang of unpleasant thugs started hanging out there and threatening people who would patronize the place. What do you do? Do you simply give up on the enjoyable activity or do you stand up to the thugs?

I don’t think Lewinsky is the best example of this type of hypocrisy. Nearly twenty years ago, Juanita Broderick went on national television and described in detail how Bill Clinton had rape her violently. A few lone voices in the feminist movement spoke up for her, but the overwhelming response from both the national media and Feminist hierarchy was to give Bill a pass.

The point of this example is that the women who have been memetically seduced into Third Wave feminism are true believers and do harm while on autopilot. Trying to reason with them will be about as effective as trying to talk a suicide bomber out of pushing the button.

@Nop: “Good question. What I’m wondering is whether women are made aware in advance that by attending Penguincon, they implicitly agree to being hit on, & lose their right to complain when someone gropes them. Prior to today, I’d certainly never heard of Penguincon having a policy that could be interpreted this way.”

No one has advocated for anyone “losing their right to complain when someone gropes them.” The only person complaining about being touched inappropriately at Penguicon in this thread appears to be esr himself (and calling that groping is perhaps a stretch).

As for being “hit on”, that’s a very ambiguous term, as is “making a pass at” as others have used. People flirt and strike up conversations with each other and that shouldn’t be considered offensive. People sometimes misread signals, but so long as a clear “I’m not interested” is sufficient, no one is harmed. Attempting to confuse the issue by talking about “groping” and “harassment” as if they are the same thing as “attempting to strike up a conversation with someone you are attracted to for purposes of potential sexual overtures if your approach is well received” is foul, despicable, and indicative of a desire to condemn heterosexuality itself.

I don’t have the comment right in front of me, but the person who was talking about manners and the difference between dealing with one person being rude or misreading signals and OMG THE PATRIARCHY IS OPPRESSING US BY ASKING US OUT was definitely on to something.

To all the people continuing pushing this issue and accusing esr of things: you have just proven that the warning provided to esr was entirely accurate. You are attempting to do, in this comments section, exactly what he was warned would be done. Your plan to collect a scalp by having someone in close physical proximity make an allegation was blown, but hey, if you just make the accusation and generate enough smoke, surely people will assume there’s a fire…

Okay, so what would be the SJW code of conduct? Only women are allowed to initiate flirting? Only non-balding handsome men are allowed to initiate flirting?

Basically, uh, yes.

Among orangutans there are two types of males: flanged and unflanged. Flanged males are the dominant males; they have the two big flaps on the sides of their face. They are the orangutan equivalent of Terry Crews in the Old Spice commercials. They don’t have to do anything to attract female attention; they let out a loud booming mating call and the females come to them. Unflanged males have no such luck; they either have to strike out on their own and form a new troop, at which time their flanges will grow (flanges are secondary sex characteristics which are suppressed in subdominant males since if a flanged male encounters another flanged male he will attack); or they can sneak up on an unsuspecting female and force her into coitus.

Now, back to humans: if a woman observes a subdominant, low-SMV male showing obvious sexual interest, her prehistoric ape brain kicks in and raises the “rape imminent” alarm signal. You can be subdominant or you can be horny, but you can’t be both. Men who are both are called “creeps”.

The feminist angle comes into play when you realize that given the strength advantage men have over women, women live much more fear-filled lives than do men because they are surrounded by people who could do them grievous harm. That makes women inherently unequal to men, and in order for feminist goals of equality to be met, HAS to change. So creeps (again any horny, subdominant male) are dealt with much more harshly in the past because women have the right to not live in fear of them and thus not encounter them.

The ONLY solution is to either stop being subdominant (work out, work on your grooming, develop a swagger) or stop being horny (“stick to video games” as I’ve heard it put). If you are not top-ranked in terms of your SMV, any interaction with women that suggests sexual interest will put you at risk. And if you are approached by women, either your SMV is high or you are being targeted for financial or other exploitation.

>Now, back to humans: if a woman observes a subdominant, low-SMV male showing obvious sexual interest, her prehistoric ape brain kicks in and raises the “rape imminent” alarm signal. You can be subdominant or you can be horny, but you can’t be both. Men who are both are called “creeps”.

Yup. Which is one reason accusing me of being a creeper is funny. There are a lot of negative adjectives that might be chosen to describe me, but “subdominant”? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

“And who said women (or men) that matter, implicitly agree to be hit on by showing up?” – well, allowing for “flirting” and “hitting on” as synonyms (or near enough as to make no difference),
Jay Maynard did. Which was what prompted my response, which was what prompted Nop’s response.

I think that’s true – but the first and largest lies they tell are to themselves, after which they form a pathological, unsane sort of “truth” in their heads. Vox Day’s tagline is misleading because it suggests conscious, tactical lying and I actually don’t think that dominates their behavior. The nature of their lies is deeper and weirder than that.

Don’t worry, there are a decent lot of us that aren’t like this — it’s a shame that a group would decide to hurt all women in tech by pulling this sort of garbage. I’m sorry you have to go through this.

>Don’t worry, there are a decent lot of us that aren’t like this — it’s a shame that a group would decide to hurt all women in tech by pulling this sort of garbage. I’m sorry you have to go through this.

I think it’s a shame, too. And my upset is nothing compared to how my female-geek friends feel about it.

Thanks for the support, and don’t feel too concerned. I’m about as well positioned and equipped to handle this kind of crapfest as anyone reasonably could be.

Random832: What Jay Maynard actually said was that the convention has a system in place, which is designed so that women (and men) can -explicitly- and -individually- flag what sort of advances they are comfortable with.

This is the exact and perfect opposite of the nonsense you are suggesting – that they implicitly agree to some sort of everything goes policy regardless of what they would prefer themselves.

>Random832: What Jay Maynard actually said was that the convention has a system in place, which is designed so that women (and men) can -explicitly- and -individually- flag what sort of advances they are comfortable with.

Yes, and it’s pretty fine-grained. You can specify, for example, cuddles but not sex. (Usually. The ribbons vary at different cons, the system is evolving, and there’s limited space on the ribbon.)

There’s an SNL sketch of a “Sexual Harassment Training Video” with Tom Brady, based off the observation that normal, even innocuous behavior by unattractive men is labeled creepy/harassment, while attractive men doing the same thing through actually being rude/callous/etc. is just fine.

Good question. What I’m wondering is whether women are made aware in advance that by attending Penguincon, they implicitly agree to being hit on, & lose their right to complain when someone gropes them. Prior to today, I’d certainly never heard of Penguincon having a policy that could be interpreted this way.

To my knowledge, no. Most likely because “implicitly agreeing to be it on”, or “losing one’s right to complain when groped”, isn’t the policy of the convention, nor was anything approximating that stated. Only a fool whom is actively looking for things to be troubled and offended by would interpret a culture of friendly flirting, or simple and effective tools to keep said flirting from going too far as the absurdity quoted above.

>I think that’s true – but the first and largest lies they tell are to themselves, after which they form a pathological, unsane sort of “truth” in their heads.

Leaving aside that it’s a rhetorical statement and not absolutely true in every single utterance, yes. They believe something false, and there are none so blind as those who will not see. The worst, WILL deliberately lie because something may be “fake but true”.

But it remains that the biggest lies are the ones they tell themselves about the nature of the world and people around them. Their very existence becomes a lie, filtered through a perspective that is false to reality.

This quote is too good not to share here, because it shows that some SJW strategies are not new. The more things change….

“Little does the public reck how much of the news it devours every day is manufactured by entrepreneurs. Not infrequently, I have detected as much as a whole page of it in the eminent Sunpaper, a journal more suspicious than most: it is far worse in others. One reads that the representative of a national organization is before Congress demanding this or that radical change in the laws, the plain fact is that the national organization consists of its representative — that the rest of the members are simply dolts who have put up the money for his salary and expenses in order to bathe themselves in the glare of his publicity. One hears that a million children in Abyssinia are starving, that a fund of $5,000,000 is being raised to succor them, that Baltimore’s quota is $216.000, the plain fact is that an accomplished drive manager has got a new job. One hears that “the women of the United States” are up in arms about this or that; the plain fact is that eight fat women, meeting in a hotel parlor, have decided to kick up some dust.” —from “The Uplift as a Trade” by H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, March 2, 1915

Well, the issue is that ESR’s comment: “As Jay says. The purpose of these ribbons is to avoid the kind of breach of manners Honey committed when she tongue-kissed me without knowing my mono/poly status.” seems to imply that there is some level below that (but above “nothing”) that is considered acceptable as a default for people without ribbons. It didn’t become a breach of manners until tongue was involved?

Where you went wrong was -seems to imply-. Your imagination -seems- to have filled in a lot of blank space. There is no need to read the bones here, or lay out your deck of tarot cards. Figure the facts out. Asking questions politely is a good start.

So, you have a rumor from an anonymous source, and 0 facts|confirmation. How very scientific of you, Eric

He doesn’t have 0 facts|confirmation, and the source is not anonymous to him.

And Eric was clear about that in the original post. Which means, for example, that if I were to say to Eric, “I’m skeptical about your claim, given that I don’t know your source; as a result, I’m probably going to be sensitive to claims against Torvalds, but will probably take them with less salt than you do; is that rational?”, I think he would probably say “yes”. He might remind me of the risks involved, but he knows he can’t operate except in terms of information we can both confirm, and he’s obviously aware of that.

Contrast with various citations of this blogpost I’m seeing in articles around the net. They’re nowhere near as scrupulous about repeating Eric’s scrupulousness here. Neither Breitbart nor the various articles opposing him (one even cites him as “addled”!).

I’d say Eric is being unusually scientific here. He’s also somewhat emotionally invested, but who isn’t?

(Eric, I hope you and others will hesitate to count Moira with the bad-faith arguers here. She’s an acquaintance, and I’d prefer not to jump to that conclusion without more information.)

>Which means, for example, that if I were to say to Eric, “I’m skeptical about your claim, given that I don’t know your source; as a result, I’m probably going to be sensitive to claims against Torvalds, but will probably take them with less salt than you do; is that rational?”, I think he would probably say “yes”

Duh. Of course I would.

>(Eric, I hope you and others will hesitate to count Moira with the bad-faith arguers here. She’s an acquaintance, and I’d prefer not to jump to that conclusion without more information.)

Concidentally I believe I may have met her, years ago, in live-action gaming circles. Didn’t know her well.

On this business of ribbons with letters on them: it reminds me of the “Open Source Boobs Project” which proposed a visual marker indicating the wearer wouldn’t mind a friendly breast grope. It was roundly cracked down upon by feminists — for good reason, in light of the ape-brain theory above: If to know what a MOTAS is or is not open to, you need some sort of visual indicator, then you lack the social wherewithal to be a dominant flanged male and are AUTOMATICALLY a creep; no woman should ever have to deal with you. Work on your social skills, sperg.

Tsk. Really now. A good SJW like you using a dismissive epithet to disparage someone with Asperger’s? (I can’t think of anything else “sperg” would expand to.) I thought that was precisely the kind of thing SJWs crusaded against.

And forcing people to guess about whether someone would be receptive to an advance is how we got ourselves into this situation. I thought SJWs were all about people not making advances without getting consent first? You know, “consent culture”, as implicitly opposed to “rape culture”?

@TriggerFinger: ‘No one has advocated for anyone “losing their right to complain when someone gropes them.” ‘
You’d need to argue that one with ESR, as he’s the one who said that it’s socially unacceptable at Penguicon for a woman to complain about someone making a pass at her.
If you missed that comment, I suggest that you read the whole thread instead of skipping ahead.

And to think we were being told that man-hating feminism wasn’t the default/mainstream among the supposedly “reality-based” community.

Mainstream media outlets – the same ones who took Anita “I’ll actually show you I’m pissing on your boots but still insist it’s raining” Snarkeesian at face value and made a “gamer gate” episode of L&O:SJW?

The same ones that called Brad, Larry, Sarah, etc. and company from sad puppies a bunch of white male racists without bothering to check? And then declared that Brad was using his wife of 20 years as a shield? That had to retract a legally actionable article?

If anyone needed proof of alternate realities, you provide it. That or that hallucinogens in large quantities are bad for you. Do we need to get you back on SSRI’s?

>Nop, I’d have been stunned if the leftist MSM didn’t treat the story as that writer did. It challenges too many of his most cherished beliefs.

I tore a strip out of his hide when he emailed me afterwards, finishing with “Wondering why nobody trusts the mainstream media? Look in the mirror.”

What a benightedly ignorant, arrogant tool, sadly an all-too-typical member of the journalistic class these days. It wasn’t a conscious hit piece – I think he actually genuinely didn’t understand what a steaming pile of unexamined prejudices he had spewed forth.

@Nop: What esr actually said was that it was socially unacceptable for attendees to “out” each other, a convention which is quite different from “complaining about someone making a pass”. And I didn’t even have to scroll back to remember what he actually said compared to what you said he said.

@TriggerFinger > What esr actually said was that it was socially unacceptable for attendees to “out” each other, a convention which is quite different from “complaining about someone making a pass”.

If it’s so different, then why did he say it when the latter was what was already under discussion?

@Nop: No-one’s defining their terms very well here, but to most people there’s a pretty huge gap between “making a pass” and “groping”, and this is multiple times you’ve responded to people who said the former as if they had conceded the latter.

Maynard, the “sperg” comment was mild sarcasm. I’m not an SJW. I know, shocking to someone who sees a Red lurking in every bush. I do think the SJWs deserve more benefit of the doubt than do the Gators or manosphere in general. And I don’t write the rules on how people with low social skills get treated. They are iron laws of human interaction, but now cops and lawyers are involved because social ineptitude is, increasingly, criminal behavior. (Catcalling has been rebranded “street harassment”, and an unsuccessful move was afoot in the UK to get it declared a form of sexual assault.)

I don’t like all these developments, but again, I’m not writing the rules.

And forcing people to guess about whether someone would be receptive to an advance is how we got ourselves into this situation.

I think the idea is: if you lack the wherewithal to make such a guess, assume “no”. And tools to compensate for social difficulty like the ribbons must be vigorously opposed and banned — because that may give creeps hope that they might score.

That, right there, says all that needs saying about the piece. A true journalist, one who cares about getting the story right rather than pushing a particular viewpoint, would have gotten your comment before publishing, or at least made an honest attempt at it.

You’ve jumped the shark. Absent is the usual clear-thinking that is the hallmark of your writing; it has been replaced with pointless fear-mongering. This is the kind of low-brow office-politicking I would expect to find … elsewhere.

On the general nature of this post: what statistical evidence do you have that your “advice” is worth anything? Can you even produce a single relevant event, let alone evidence that this is a tactic being replicated all over the world?

On the specific claim that the Ada Initiative targeted Linus Torvalds: You’ve already admitted that this claim is basically unfalsifiable since Linus will not confirm or deny anything. Do you even see the irony? (Your source claims Ada Initiative would target well-known individuals like Linus in order to generate outrage. This post’s main content, and it’s draw to the MSM, centers around your name-dropping of Linus. I’m sure he appreciates that, since you’re on such good terms with him.)

I you discovered that your source was day-dreaming, would you post a retraction? Can you even imagine your source being erroneous?

Good luck killing the Buddha …

***

Have to say though, I’m curious as to what kind of honey trap your source specifies. Are the instigators to fabricate incidences of sexual harassment, or are they to select targets who will, with high probability, attempt to ‘make a pass’ which they can then report to the outside world as harassment?

>You’ve already admitted that this claim is basically unfalsifiable since Linus will not confirm or deny anything.

Don’t be a bloody idiot. Linus could falsify the claim with three words. It would be politically easy and safe for him to do so. It would land him in various complications to confirm it. Since both things are the case, a Bayesian would treat his silence as weak confirmation. I’m amazed I even have to spell this out.

>I you discovered that your source was day-dreaming, would you post a retraction?

Of course. If you actually followed this blog, you’d know the answer to that already.

>Can you even imagine your source being erroneous?

Sure, but after the scalping of Tim Hunt, and Donglegate, and the smearing of Michael Shermer – not to mention what I know about my source’s position of observation that you don’t – it’s low odds. His accusation is consistent with the known tactics of these groups – more extreme, but a friend who has approached me privately after having observed the Ada Initiative from close up proposes plausibly that this is accounted for by Val Aurora being as crazy as a loon.

>Have to say though, I’m curious as to what kind of honey trap your source specifies. Are the instigators to fabricate incidences of sexual harassment, or are they to select targets who will, with high probability, attempt to ‘make a pass’ which they can then report to the outside world as harassment?

You know what I do. He hasn’t elaborated since. I could ask, but I’m reluctant because I don’t want to reveal any clues to his identity even accidentally and these things have a way of leaking through if the source says too much. I disguised his writing style and even the length of his IRC nick in the transcript – that’s how careful I’m being. I will post more information only if he volunteers it.

I will now speculate. If I were planning an op like this, I would hope that the target’s dick would lead him into temptation and make a pass, but settle for an unfalsifiable fabrication if I couldn’t get that.

Just you wait. Won’t be long before codes of conduct are implemented to address this sort of thing.

I’m speaking from the backlash I observed towards Open Source Boobs, which was a bit more rube-ish but, if properly implemented, should be harmless.

The nature of their lies is deeper and weirder than that.

When such a person speaks, it’s not really them speaking. It’s a “virtual machine” running in their heads that’s nicely insulated from reality so it doesn’t have to deal with the icky truths that undermine their philosophy. The “hypervisor” has to deal with reality, of course, and does so often with ruthless pragmatism, but it presents a view of the outside world to the “VM” that keeps whatever idealized fairytale reality the VM-self clings to intact. Some examples:

* A natural-medicine nut who still takes their kids to the actual doctor when things go wrong.

* A “teach men not to rape” apologist for female helplessness. What’s in your purse, lady? Can of mace? Derringer, perhaps, if you’re from Austin?

>Just you wait. Won’t be long before codes of conduct are implemented to address this sort of thing.

You don’t get it at all. SF fandom codes of conduct would be way more likely to institutionalize these signaling ribbons than ban them. (Every fan reading this blog is nodding his or her head now. Likely several of them will comment to confirm.) Women aren’t passively accepting this device, they are enthusiastic adopters themselves. They want men to do this.

This doesn’t falsify the “creep = low-SMV male showing interest in a higher-SMV female” model, which I believe is correct. It just means that women in fandom estimate the SMV of male fans higher than you do. Which shouldn’t be any surprise; they keep showing up, and women are not in general prone to do repeats at social venues full of what they consider unfit males.

It is not “fear-mongering” to factually document the behaviors of this feminist cult. Shaming witchhunts are routine. There is Shanley Kane, there is the Adria Richards affair, there is the unethical and immoral Ada. There is the UVA/Rolling Stone hoax. Only REAL journalism saved that. There are endless declarations by people like Zerlina Maxwell and Jessica Valenti that due process is irrelevant. There is the Stanford affair. Only REAL journalism saved that guy. There is the mattress girl hoax. Only REAL journalism saved that guy. I can no longer keep track of the doxxings and swattings in GamerGate, or how many “journalists” were colluding to advance feminist dogma. Anti-internet harassment advocate Randi Harper actually harassed a male feminist out of his own career and publicly threatened an innocent collection agency employee for doing their job. False accusations of racism, transphobia and misogyny are like rain. How many men have lost their jobs for public statements much less bigoted than feminists get away with every day? Could any white man working at Publisher’s Weekly get away with saying most black women should come with a trigger warning for arrogance as did a goofball “genderqueer” woman about “most white men”? I could list hundreds more.

There is no “fear-mongering” going on here, there is only a recording device showing a factual trend among these absurd and dismal people.

triggerfinger: “And I didn’t even have to scroll back to remember what he actually said compared to what you said he said.”

Lying about what someone said when the original words are still there on the same freakin’ screen is a sign of just how divorced from reality people like nop are, and I’ve noticed that they’ve started doing it a lot.

That might be an effective (though reprehensible) tactic when the original statements aren’t immediately available, but when they are? It’s total crazytown.

“Lying about what someone said when the original words are still there on the same freakin’ screen”

As I pointed out, what someone replied to is just as important as what they said. ESR read the words “Fact is that you made a pass at my close friend’s wife at a FOSS event.” and chose to interpret that as, in the hypothetical situation that Nop is being truthful, someone “outing” him.

I also have to wonder why we’re even assuming he’s heard of the claim at this point. Are we trusting the journalistic integrity of the media outlets that are reporting this? Have you (ESR) asked him yourself?

thakyuo four bringing up “why sjws always lye”. i think it made a compeling case for why jon scalsi is not a very popular author and why vox dai is much more populer. i think it is becos sjws lye which make jon scalsi look moar populer. i especially enjoyed chaptar five which was very well written.

Unless someone is in possession of some information that shows tech conventions suffer an unusually high number of rapes, what’s the point of acting as if men generally sanction harassment and rape at such affairs, or anywhere? We all know society has victims of crimes – is the entire country to be ruled by the worst possible reactions to crime by its victims, or men judged by the worst of men? Don’t we have law and a court system? Why act as if men are simply bad? I just don’t get this – what’s the point? Men who don’t rape won’t – men who do aren’t liable to be affected by lectures or badges. That’s why we have laws that distinguish between the two, rather than lumping them together in an act of bigotry stripped of context.

The truth is there are a lot of anonymous crazy people on the internet. Then there are others who aren’t anonymous at all. Morons printed up cards to hand out to people at the 2014 PyCon to whomever they deemed were violating their personal space or whatever the fuck people with skins as thin as a molecule do to enhance their offense at the world. These anti-harassment cards are nothing new at tech cons – men have been known to purposefully go out of their way to collect them just to show their contempt for the whole idea. I can already see a future where everyone in America is a jiggling and glittering bunch of idiots handing each other cards, leaving them on cars, putting them in a cashier’s pocket, pasting them to the neighbor’s door and shoving them up their own backsides.

Get this:

“Creeper Move! If you have received this card, you have done something wildly inappropriate or otherwise harassed the person who handed this to you. You should be happy you got a card and not a punch in the face. Check yourself – you might not be this lucky twice!”

The person who created these cards says they are “meant to be a non-confrontational way of engaging with harassment.” It seems to me that such depraved announcements not only easily meet a definition of harassment but could arguably be a cause for a citizen’s arrest.

I’m not sure why an implied threat of physical assault doesn’t fall under the purview of harassment or abuse which Selena Deckelmann says can consist of being ignored, or Valerie Aurora’s timeline which says can be a flirtatious public interview. Shouldn’t these FYI you’re-lucky-I-didn’t-rape-you cards be on Aurora’s “timeline of sexist incidents in geek communities?” Aren’t such cards themselves harassment? Fucking hypocrites who use their politicized dislike of men and hide it behind a screen of “justice” is the answer, since there is no fair and binding principle being invoked which applies to both sides.

While there is little doubt at least some sexual harassment occurs at tech or SF conventions, to simply spread it all around as commonplace without context and further act as if the same thing wouldn’t occur at a female dominated romance writer’s convention is absurd, especially considering the insanely low threshold these thought police use to define harassment, which could be almost anything. The law in fact doesn’t recognize in advance that women are more cultured in such matters or whites liable to racism. That’s not the way it should work here either. When it does, one is already hopelessly biased.

The law wouldn’t ask a female witness who attended tech conventions to give details about a specific harassment she didn’t actually see simply because she “knows” it occurs and is an innately cultured and moral female. But that’s exactly what’s occurring here, and the hunters are out and about. Adria Richards’s supporters consider a shining example of such harassment to be a couple of guys making dongle jokes among themselves. If that’s all Richards and her supporters have to worry about, I declare sexual harassment at tech conferences to be abolished and cured. Hysterical overreaction is a phrase that comes to mind, and they are stabbing their own cause in the foot if they expect me to start expressing horror over dongles.

The real problem with the signaling ribbons solution is that it doesn’t allow for the status quo of plausible deniability. There are all sorts of reasons why folks, especially female folks, would rather “opt-in” to flirting, on a case-by-case basis. And yes, “low SMV” can definitely be a factor – but what people often miss in these discussions is that “SMV” is quite malleable and situation-dependent.

(In fact, if I wanted to be provocative, I would even say that since projecting tolerably-high SMV is so easy and so effective at smoothing over all sorts of social interactions, that it really is rude and disrespectful not to do it! Of course the story is more complex than that, but still.)

But of course, much of this becomes quite irrelevant when a vicious political movement wants to collect your scalp. You’d be foolish to accept flirting from _anyone_ in such circumstances. Now, to be honest, it has been crystal-clear as far back as Donglegate that something like this was going on. But this is also why the idea that open source leaders are now making things up _for their own selfish benefit_ is so unintentionally hilarious.

@guest: You’ve hit on exactly what the problem is with the ribbons — women don’t make the decision about whether sexual advances are favored or disfavored until they can see and evaluate who is making those advances. You don’t need a ribbon; you need augmented reality and a simple, public “will you slap me if I ask you out?” API that doesn’t notify the person running the API that someone queried it. (Not notifying avoids potential embarrassment for both parties and removes contextual information that might confuse results — ie, was it the cute guy I am talking to who queried, or the nerd in the corner?)

Now, we used to have such an API: the wedding ring. If you wore one, you weren’t supposed to be approached or do the approaching. If you weren’t married but didn’t want to be approached, you could wear one anyway and remove it in a specific context if necessary. (Or if you were married, and wanted to approach someone, too). You could look for a ring discreetly, and that put one limit on such things. Obviously no one would approach children, so there’s a lower limit, and coming of age ceremonies or promenades or coming-out parties or similar customs would announce availability. Or something as simple as whether a woman’s hair is worn short or long, loose or restrained. Not to mention the now-abandoned custom of asking the head of a household for permission to court his daughter. Such things have been rejected by feminists as pointless misogynistic patriarchal controls on femininity, but they had a real practical purpose in helping people navigate the rather daunting social elements of courtship.

TriggerFinger, I’m not sure. I think the “new rules” of courtship do make a lot of sense, even if they are rather more complicated than the older ones. So, in a sense, I have to agree with these feminists: we have traded away some societal control and the attendant simplicity, but there have been gains in that individuals can more easily negotiate their stance. One of the “new rules” is that it doesn’t really make sense to ask someone out until you’ve gotten to know them more discreetly and some minimal social comfort has been established. In general terms (absent willful sabotage, of course) this gives you enough info to make a good prediction.

@guest: The problem is, that “new rule” doesn’t apply to the high-SMV folks who can do almost anything without consequences, and it leaves the average and low SMV folks out in the cold, because “Would you like to get a cup of coffee sometime so we can get to know each other?” has become a minefield: if you are acceptable, you could be in bed together that night, and if not, you might not have a job the next morning. The cost of prediction failure has been shifted entirely to the male, and entirely front-loaded, and that means that the opportunity to establish that minimal social comfort is available only to the high-smv (who face little risk) or the extremely risk-tolerant.

I think it’s common decency to have and adhere to simple, reasonable social customs concerning who is or is not open to being approached, and starting with a simple and polite “I’m not interested, thanks” rather than going straight to the rape whistle.

@ PapayaSF: I think you are missing the essential conflict between the “cast the assholes out” viewpoint and the SJW/cultural Marxism/intersectional/third-wave feminist view. The latter focuses on “patriarchy” and “cishetnormativity” and “the legacy of colonialism and slavery” and “rape culture” and “structural oppression” and so on. To an SJW, individual assholes merely express the social forces that are the real ideological enemy.

Not at all. The problem is twofold. One side of the problem goes something like this: The failure mode of “anti-asshole” is “he’s a worse asshole.” The failure mode of anti-crazy is “She’s even crazier.” This is the failure mode Eric is falling into. He’s got this idea of SJWs as an extension of communism and a tendency to say stuff like, “…this report is consistent with reports of SJW dezinformatsiya tactics from elsewhere and I think it would be safest to assume that they are being replicated by other women-in-tech groups.” or “(Don’t like that, ladies? Tough. You were just fine with collective guilt when the shoe was on the other foot. Enjoy your turn!)”

In the context of this discussion I don’t need to explain how that could be taken out of context, right?

The other issue says, “Is your expressed ideology sufficiently sophisticated to handle a serious challenge?” Eric’s ideology is damnably simplistic, and a smart Women’s Studies graduate in the first year of her Master’s would crush him in anything which remotely resembled a fairly administered debate. Her “structural oppression” and “rape cultures” trump his second-hand John Bircher rhetoric easily. Part of this is the fact that “second wave” feminism had a pretty intelligent map of reality, which means that “third wave” feminism, despite its craziness, inherits lots of characteristics from a fundamentally sane world view… and the other part is that Eric isn’t really trying hard to come up with ways to differentiate SJWs from women with real problems, or sort out his allies from his enemies, or deal with the issue by doing something other than throwing maledictions at a group which disbanded six months ago…He’s just coasting along in his groove, writing code and making the odd nutty political post, which is sad because if he was more attuned to – frustrated! – more attuned to all kinds of stuff – he might have something interesting to say or contribute to solving the problem.

I just got a call to go help someone with their car, so I’ll hopefully respond to more people tomorrow, but meanwhile I think you see where I’m going with this – maybe a more complex view of a complex issue would give better results – that all.

>Eric’s ideology is damnably simplistic, and a smart Women’s Studies graduate in the first year of her Master’s would crush him in anything which remotely resembled a fairly administered debate.

ROFL. “Women’s studies” is one of the degrees that effectively selects for stupidity, because the really bright people are off doing something with more substance, like STEM or law or medicine. Besides, I’ve read their writing – it is not the product of first-rate minds. I don’t believe there’s a “Women’s studies” major on the planet who could “crush” me.

And if you really think I sound like a Bircher, you got up on the dumb side of the bed this morning.

@Troutwaxer: “Eric’s ideology is damnably simplistic, and a smart Women’s Studies graduate in the first year of her Master’s would crush him in anything which remotely resembled a fairly administered debate.”

Yeah, and my mom would totally beat up your dad. Totally. With one breast tied behind her back or removed entirely.

@Troutwaxer: “Her “structural oppression” and “rape cultures” trump his second-hand John Bircher rhetoric easily. Part of this is the fact that “second wave” feminism had a pretty intelligent map of reality, which means that “third wave” feminism, despite its craziness, inherits lots of characteristics from a fundamentally sane world view…”

…. and your idea of an intelligent map of reality consists of structural oppression and rape culture?

> because “Would you like to get a cup of coffee sometime so we can get to know each other?” has become a minefield

Only as a result of politically-motivated sabotage. The only way to win _that_ game is not to play. (I’m assuming here that you didn’t just invite her to get that “cup of coffee” in your own hotel room, late at night, and that this wasn’t the _very first thing_ you said to her. That’s something quite different, of course.)

Troutwaxer, SJW _is_ an extension of communism – most specifically, an extension of its cultural-revolutionist branch of Mao Zedong and Pol Pot fame. Their rhethoric (“STEM culture is a bourgeois privilege!”) is straight out of the playbook of Mao and the Mao-influenced Frankfurt School.

Stop the presses, @Jeff Read is becoming red pill! :-) No seriously Jeff, looks like you have accepted some RP stuff on the factual level, just on the values level not. I mean on the factual level you should know already that women hold all the power in the sexual marketplace -as they don’t need to become anything special to get laid – and thus it is not fair to steer rules in their favor. And on the values level sexual freedom for one gender and unfreedom for another isn’t a good deal.

But on the factual level it seems you are getting it, and there is a lot of truth in this, below a certain attractiveness level rejection is almost assured and if even scares women, it makes sense to have etiquette against it. Even my 100% alpha absolutely old-fashioned non-feminist dad told me if you don’t get some indicator of interest, like a look or smile, don’t bother, save your face and avoid a humiliating rejection. These are good rules. The problems are the following:

– Somehow this etiquette stuff – you do something mildly wrong, people frown, you back off – is not working these days. Part of the story is diversity – the more diverse you are, the the less you can rely on contextual knowledge and thus you have to make rules clear is a stupid low context literal way. This is a big problem – diversity, mostly through migration, is killing these “good old unwritten rules everybody felt” thing. Manners and etiquette. I wonder how many women don’t dare to tell it because not wanting to look racist, but her major problem is with the Indian and similar programmers imported to the US/UK? I mean, it would not actually be racist to say guys who came from a culture where arranged marriage still exists will, er, have some misunderstandings but I think they don’t dare to say that these days.

– But an even bigger problem is that this isn’t frowns. The SJW stuff is destroying careers and can get men into prison. Seriously it looks more like a war than ball room etiquette rules.. Of course, etiquette can be worked out with non-SJW women. But on the SJW level the aggressivity of it all is amazing. The weirdest part is, by the way, that they always go for the soft guy, the liberal guy who is mostly with them, just made a quip or two. Not the 100% dedicated hardcore right-wing antifeminist. So at some level this swarming looks like the internal purge of the not 100% dedicated.

– Other details: there is a lot of gray zone between subdominant and dominant men. Also some subdominant men have charming IQ and humor and sometimes that works, but they cannot wait for IOIs, they must strike up conversations.

@TheDividualist: Absolutely. Robert Putnam’s work shows how “diversity” (the modern secular religion) actually decreases social trust.

For the latest Onion-level example, check out the story of Air Force Tech. Sgt. Aaron D. Allmon II. (No link, to avoid spam filter.) For three kisses, six touches, and inappropriate comments, he’s being courtmartialed and faces up to 130 years in prison. Never mind his accomplishments and PTSD from Iraq and Afghanistan, today’s military has new priorities! He should have done something minor, like desert in the face of the enemy, if he wanted mercy from the Obama administration.

I think the tide may well be turning on the SJWs. The defeat of the wonderfully-named HERO initiative in Houston was a shock, and the usual crowd is frothing. Even a big city with a lesbian mayor drew the line at the invention of the “civil right” of men to declare themselves women walk into the women’s bathrooms and dressing rooms and showers. Perhaps the idea that everyone must accommodate the desires of ever-tinier sexual minorities has hit its limit.

Troutwaxer- ‘a smart Women’s Studies graduate in the first year of her Masters would crush [eric} easily’

I think ‘smart’ is the crux. Say I’m too dumb and lazy and ignorant for college. High-functioning mildly retarded, IQ 80-95. Worked the system well enough, or the pay-rents, or both, to get into a ‘university’, but not going to actually crack the books for eighty-hour weeks of study. And it’s not like I grew up in a house full of books or really studied anything but porn on the web. What choice do I have in college? I NEED easy A’s. If I’m female, women’s studies. Black, african american studies. Gay, okay. Straight White Male? I’d better be a True Believer in the Pop Sosh Democratic Party Line. All easy A courses are courses in loyalty to the Democratic Party. And I take Computer Science because I’m not too dumb to type, but it ain’t like I’m Linus Torvald. They are taking a mean advantage of my double digit IQ with their ‘show me the code’ and their triple digit IQs. They are elitists. I am oppressed. I shall revolt by any means necessary!

The deeper into women’s studies one goes the crazier one gets, so Troutwaxer’s comment makes little sense. When you get to the part where proper pronouns like Zir and Zhe or whatever the hell they are can undo the fiction of reproductive heterosexuality you’ve descended into the 36th Chamber of Idiocy.

The last 5 minutes of her video remind me of Aurthur Schessinger making the same point in the 90’s. “Identity Culture” wasn’t in full swing yet, but he saw it coming. And he was a liberalist (NOT a liberal in the partisan sense)
Observe:
[embed]https://youtu.be/mFKFNdN8FbQ?t=1h7m48s[/embed]
I highly recommend that anyone who has time watch the whole thing. He is fascinating.

@ESR: “Don’t be a bloody idiot. Linus could falsify the claim with three words. It would be politically easy and safe for him to do so. It would land him in various complications to confirm it. Since both things are the case, a Bayesian would treat his silence as weak confirmation.”
Linus isn’t responding to your mention of him in your paranoid rant for the same reason that Obama or the Pope wouldn’t respond to it if you’d named them instead – you’re simply a nonentity to them, just like any other ranting idiot on the Internet. Hell, the only reason /I’m/ responding to you is because one of my character flaws is the enjoyment of online train-wrecks.

>ESR likes to imagine that he’s Torvalds’ peer, & of equal importance to the world of FOSS. Very few other people think this, obviously.

This might astonish you, Nop, but I would be happier if you were anywhere near right. Indispensable men are very bad for their movements, and I’ve spent a lot of effort in the last ten years trying to not be that guy. I have not succeeded as well as I could wish.

In the kind of world-changing I’m trying to do, success is measured by the extent to which your radicalism becomes conventional wisdom and your name is correspondingly forgotten. One reason so many reformers fail is that they choose fame over victory, ego over ubiquity. One of my very first strategic choices when History tapped me on the shoulder in the late 1990s was to avoid that mistake.

By all means, go on believing I don’t matter much, and never did. I worked hard to give you the luxury of that ignorance, and I don’t regret it at all.

@ PapayaSF
Putnam also said this:
“[…] I think over the long run, as we get to know one another, and as we begin to see things that we have in common with people who don’t look like us, this allergy to diversity tends to diminish and to go away. So this is not something that I think as an argument against immigration. On the contrary, actually, I think in the long run we’ll all be better. But I don’t think that progressives and integrationists like me do our cause any service by hiding from ourselves the fact that it’s not easy.”
Cite: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12802663

>I think over the long run, as we get to know one another, and as we begin to see things that we have in common with people who don’t look like us, this allergy to diversity tends to diminish and to go away.

I’ve studied the history of multicultural polities, and I think Putnam is tragically wrong about this – it’s a perfect case of liberal wishful thinking clouding sober judgment.

What Putnam mistakes for long-term reduction in allergy to diversity is a reduction in diversity itself – mutual assimilation (we eat each others’ food, we celebrate each others’ holidays, we intermarry). Allergy to actual diversity is wired too deeply into the human backbrain to be socialized out. This is regrettable, but there were sound reasons for it in the environment of ancestral adaptation and we’re stuck with it.

Generally speaking, the historical pattern is you get to pick any two of three: (a) high trust, (b) ethnic diversity, (c) linguistic diversity. All three pairs are historically attested; the least familiar to modern Westerners is both kinds of diversity with low trust. Polyethnic empires like the Ottoman Empire were like that; the Former Soviet Union still is. What you don’t get as a stable situation is all three at once. When you try, social trust collapses. In modern terms, you get a failed state.

So, for example, the U.S. has a tradition of successfully managing ethnic diversity via linguistic uniformity and long-term mutual assimilation. There are people who think the latter two are dispensable. I think they are dangerous fools, ignorant of history, who have no idea what they’re messing with. Putnam isn’t helping.

>Linus could falsify the claim with three words. It would be politically easy and safe for him to do so. It would land him in various complications to confirm it. Since both things are the case, a Bayesian would treat his silence as weak confirmation.

You can hardly blame me for taking your words at face value:
> Linus does sometimes answer my mail, but has zero interest in borrowing the kind of political trouble talking about this would land him in.

Am I wrong for assuming that “talking about this” includes anything resembling a denial?

and later

>There are lots of reasons for Linus in particular to not get into this fight that don’t involve fear, and I won’t blame or criticize him if he doesn’t. I’m sure you can think of a few yourself.

Given that your prior belief is that Linus avoids talking about this kind of stuff, taking silence as “weak confirmation” make no sense. Perhaps you mean weak as in on the order of nil?

The thing that really stands out about this post is that you’ve stated that you can think of plenty of plausible reasons for Linus choosing not to speak out about a real-life conspiracy to entrap him, you apparently can think of none for why your 100% trustworthy and completely infallible source could be honestly mistaken about existence of said entrapment scheme.

***
>I will now speculate. If I were planning an op like this, I would hope that the target’s dick would lead him into temptation and make a pass, but settle for an unfalsifiable fabrication if I couldn’t get that.

My recent speculation: I think to accomplish such an op you actually only need one twisted individual to be in on it. (Not that I think such an op makes any sense …)
Step 1: Find young, reasonably attractive women interested in tech.
Step 2: Encourage them to seek out mentors, people you have specifically chosen because they are either (a) known for being good with women, or (b) known for being somewhat creepy.

Encourage mentee to be as friendly and enthusiastic as possible in front of her mentor.

Step 3a: Wait for a hookup to happen. Convince mentee that the hookup was, in fact, a serious violation of ethics, and an abuse of power. Get angry on mentee’s behalf.
Step 3b: Wait for some form of crossing the line to happen. Sympathize with mentee.
Step 4: Publish results and wait for outrage.

>Am I wrong for assuming that “talking about this” includes anything resembling a denial?

Yes. I wrote the second sentence you quoted under the assumption that my source is correct and Linus would have to confirm to respond honestly. Sorry for the confusion.

>The thing that really stands out about this post is that you’ve stated that you can think of plenty of plausible reasons for Linus choosing not to speak out about a real-life conspiracy to entrap him, you apparently can think of none for why your 100% trustworthy and completely infallible source could be honestly mistaken about existence of said entrapment scheme.

No, I can think of several. I just can’t talk about why I give them very low odds of being true. As I’ve said several times, the choice between living with your disbelief and possibly setting up a friend to have his career destroyed is easy.

@ESR: “By all means, go on believing I don’t matter much, and never did. I worked hard to give you the luxury of that ignorance, and I don’t regret it at all.”
LOL. Nice humble-brag, Eric, but no, you didn’t do much of anything for me or anyone else; GNU/Linux would be in much the same place if you’d never been born.
I really hope that Torvalds does comment on your claim, because I think that whatever he says would be funny as hell.

But assimilation isn’t necessarily coercion. We don’t ask people to forsake their old identities, just place them as secondary to being a freedom loving American. When ethnic groups learn this, problems tend to diminish. That is actually one of the broader points that the Arthur Sclessinger talk I posted earlier makes. I think feminists could reasonably be prevailed on to do the same thing in hacker culture (Which is why I posted in the first place). In short: diversity can be acknowledged and embraced so long as it is not at the expense of the “dominant” identity, In this case that is hackerdom.

I think most honest social movement start like this, and then get co-opted by radicals (The Black civil rights movement is a good example)

For the record, I don’t think high trust is dispensable, and I have always been pro linguistic- uniformity at the political level. But again, I don’t think linguistic diversity should be done away with either. It just should be set aside for purposes of commerce or political discussion. Hackerdom mostly trades in English for a good reason, I noticed this rather prominently in “How to become a hacker”. But many, many hackers are mutli-lingual. This is the balance I would like to see struck in US Politics (yes, I am a native born citizen).

>Hackerdom mostly trades in English for a good reason, I noticed this rather prominently in “How to become a hacker”. But many, many hackers are mutli-lingual. This is the balance I would like to see struck in US Politics (yes, I am a native born citizen).

Agreed on both counts. But this is exactly why I took exception to your Putnam quote; I think he’s fostering the illusion that if we’re just patient enough, or social-engineer enough, allergy to diversity will diminish that nobody will have to make the choice to assimilate in order for the polity to be stable.

Troutwaxer- ‘a smart Women’s Studies graduate in the first year of her Masters would crush [eric} easily’

Uh yea.. which is why they are terrified of ‘mansplaining’. Screeching for censorship used to be evidence of being outargued, now it’s the hallmark of the rigorous feminist intellectual.

Oh wait? Did I mansplain? So sorry, here’s a hankie for you. Cry a little until you feel better. It’s not your fault you are so weak and insecure that you can’t deal with a mansplanation. It must really suck being such a pussy.

> SF fandom codes of conduct would be way more likely to institutionalize these signaling ribbons than ban them.

Only in a fantasy land of long-ago teenage boy wish fulfillment about how people act at science fiction conventions. In reality? Ye gods, no. The first time Richard M. Stallman groped a woman wearing such a ribbon we’d never hear the end of it. As with other such ideas, the “ick!” factor when someone unexpected tried it would cause the wearer to rethink their fantasy pretty quickly.

For those of you who don’t know rms personally, he tries to flirt with, and hits on, a very, very wide range of women. My transgender roommate after college considered it a proof of concept when Richard hit on her, post surgery. But unfortunately for Richard, his personal grooming habits….. reduce his likelihood of success profoundly. Note that I *like* Richard: talking to him is like talking to Moses, maybe halfway to the Promised Land when bathwater has been in short supply. He has a lot of interesting things to say, but you want to put a plastic sheet down on any furniture he might sit in.

@John D Bell
I think the “new totalitarians” are not much different from the Taliban, Salafists, Iranian Moral police, the various semi-fascist parties in Europe (Fidesz of Hungary’s, the people around Radio Maria in Poland, Russian Orthodox nationalists), or Opus Dei for that matter.

After three generations since WWII, many people seem to get sick of other people having opinions. Although the Eastern Europeans might simply never got used to opinions.

After a friend sent me a link to the news about ESR’s latest looney-toony rant making the rounds, which I had the misfortune to read after a glass or two of wine, making the vein in my forehead throb and my stomach turn. I thought about it a bit today as, though I know ESR is a crazy bastard, I think his allegation is destructive and corrosive, particularly at a time when we seem to be moving backwards in time, rather than forward, in terms of sexism in IT. (Warning for the delicate types: there may be needed swearing)

I know ESR and have had the ‘joy’ of having him try to grope me and boast about his swinger lifestyle at various conferences. (The fact he’s a swinger and I couldn’t get a date until 25 is still something I puzzle over as surely there’s a lesson to be had in that) He’s about as smarmy and as unctuous as it gets and, yet, his confidence apparently works for many as he is a talented writer and communicator.

I find it rather hilarious that he’s paranoid about ‘honey traps’ when, in reality, he’s such a flagrant handsy sexist that no entrapment should be required as if you have tits, he’ll likely try and put his hands on you at some point on the conference circuit. I’m guessing that he’s just pissed that such behavior comes with consequences now with his dire warning that ‘high profile’ open sores [sic] personalities are being ‘targeted’. Total bullshit. The accomplished women won’t touch him, so I’m pretty sure the sorts he is describing are not the technical women in the community.

What makes me angry, though, is that he is a voice in the community which tends to impress the younger boys who see him as a role model, someone they’d like to aspire to be, and don’t quite understand just how fucking insane he is yet.

I’m tired of this shit. Full stop tired. It’s 2015 and these turds who grope their way around conferences and the like can make allegations like this, get a hand wave and an, “Oh, that’s just crazy Raymond!” Fuck that. Fuck it from here to hell and back. Here’s a man who really hasn’t done anything all that special, is a totally crazy gun-toting misogynist of the highest order and, yet, he remains mostly unchallenged after the tempest dies down, time after time. Can you imagine a woman without at least a Bachelor’s and serious credentials being allowed to bloviate for so long without being slid under the ice? No.

For every male perl guy I know with a daughter…tell me, do you want your girls to grow up and STILL have to deal with this shit?

Grow a pair, boys, and stand up to this asshat and a few others you know I’ve raged about over the years with little success since, you know, I’m just a predatory woman in search of sexy rich guys like ESR…LOL. Being silent and letting the loud idiots to continue to run amok simply won’t do anymore.

I’m sure ESR will still be haunting conferences when your daughters reach their professional years unless you get serious about outing the assholes like him and making the community a lot less toxic than it is now.?

>I’m sure ESR will still be haunting conferences when your daughters reach their professional years unless you get serious about outing the assholes like him and making the community a lot less toxic than it is now.?

Oh, yeah. I’m doing such a great job of “haunting professional conferences” that I went 11 years without going to a single one.

Is there an SJW mad-libs generator somewhere where you insert someone’s name and it cranks out this tripe? It seems pretty formulaic. “Couldn’t get a date till he was 25”, indeed. *snrk*

Propaganda this crude only convinces people only if they already desperately want to believe. I could write a better character assassination in my sleep.

As demonstrated by the comments in this post, a lot of reasonable people are inclined to think that the deviant behavior warning of the OP is an edge case of social dysfunction and consequently should not be overblown. Unfortunately, it is not an edge case, but a symptom of a much larger and systemic psychopathology.

For the first time in our specie’s history, we are living in a world of extraordinary affluence and mass communication. We have virtually no existential hardship, way too much discretionary time, and swim in an ocean of endless memetic stimulation.

Modeling suggests that we are at great risk of runaway sociopathies and our hereditary feedback mechanisms for self-correction are being undermined. In other words, our politics are aggressively promoting parasitism and once a critical threshold is exceeded, the host must die.

@Jay Maynard: “Nop: “Found on social media:”
Found where on social media? Link, please. After all, if it’s on social media, it’s already out int eh open, and linking to it is not outing anyone.”

You mean like how Eric linked to /his/ IRC source? /s
Sorry, but anonymous claims work both ways; I’m not going to open someone up to harassment by identifying them. My comment was a direct cut & paste from a social media post, & you can either accept it or make up stories about it’s provenance – as I’m sure that commenters here will – but I’m not going to screw over the writer by identifying them.

Indeed. At its roots, unwarranted conduct codes are no more than catalogues of flimsy justifications to drag the wrong thinkers into the public square and hang them from gibbets (xref Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Robespierre, the Dominicans and other SJW laureates).

This is only a precursor to concocted rape charges and the like as seen elsewhere, and denied of happening by TrueBeleivers. The vacuity of those promoting this Jacobinism is on full display here in this thread – refutation statements of fact non-existent; personal vilification paramount.

This is a perverse re-expression of “the personal is the political”: for political ends, they seek to destroy the person. Hitchens nailed it fully. Probably a relief for him that he is dead –

@Nop: “I’m not going to open someone up to harassment by identifying them. My comment was a direct cut & paste from a social media post, & you can either accept it or make up stories about it’s provenance – as I’m sure that commenters here will – but I’m not going to screw over the writer by identifying them.”

Methinks the social justice warrior doth project too much.

@Nop: “Oh dog, that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in my life. Are you seriously arguing that humanity will die off if guys stop creeping on women at public events?”

Funny how you seem to perceive this whole discussion to be about guys creeping on women at public events, when it began as a discussion about how to avoid being honeytrapped by women at public events. But even within that frame, professional survival on a personal level is clearly at issue here.

“Sorry, but anonymous claims work both ways; I’m not going to open someone up to harassment by identifying them. My comment was a direct cut & paste from a social media post, & you can either accept it or make up stories about it’s provenance – as I’m sure that commenters here will – but I’m not going to screw over the writer by identifying them.”

Except that an IRC channel is not a public forum and does not retain comments for folks who were not there when they were written. A social media post does.

The person you’re defending has already identified themselves. You can do no further damage.

So I’m forced to conclude you’re making this up. Standard SJW tactic, especially when one attacks the basis of SJWism.

Next, I expect someone to try to paint me as a sexual abuser for coming to Eric’s defense. To anyone who knows me, this would be quite laughable.

Note how this accusation is clinically free of specifics – there is absolutely nothing about when it happened, where it happened, who it happened to, or who can vouch for it having happened. There is barely even anything about -what- happened – physical contact, yes, but nothing about the nature of it or under what circumstances.

It’s so cowardly that it’s embarrassing, and so talentless that it’s stupefying.

Not sure who Randal is though I could guess (I assume not Allison Randal), there’s an earlier remark by Ben Tilly on perlmonks complaining about “Randal” describing visits to prostitutes and ESR “hitting on” women; no grabbing involved.

I think if she’d actually ever met me she could have constructed a more plausible slander. How would some woman I supposedly groped at a conference have any grounds to know that I couldn’t get a date until 25, even supposing it were true? Am I supposed to have told her this while planting my filthy hands on her anatomy, reducing my SMV catastrophically? Yeah, that sounds plausible.

*shakes head*

SJWism must cause brain damage. In real life, I’d sooner fuck a tree-stump than touch a chick this dimwitted.

(There we go. Allegations that “ESR has admitted to fucking tree-stumps” in 3…2…1…)

Re: the post calling Eric a handsy misogynist: If the woman in the photo is the woman who authored the post, in all honesty I can’t imagine Eric not being able to keep his hands off her. I’ve learned a few of his attraction patterns, including that he is drawn to physical fitness in a woman. Something that lady… doesn’t have an abundance of.

Hm…I don’t know that this is actually true, or if it is it’s a secondary metric. What you might be noticing is that I’m attracted to women who wear their bodies well, who have the kind of self-confidence that can come from being fit as well as other sources such as high intelligence (and I am very attracted to that).

I’ve been in the same room as an alpha male a time or two in my days, and my experience with them is that they flirt with women as easily as they breathe–and that women are almost universally receptive to it.

I have little doubt ESR has “hit on” women in droves in his days. I have significant doubt anyone has ever complained about it except intellectually co-opted white knights and women who are jealous it wasn’t them.

It’s not so much that the accusation is untrue as that it’s vacuous unto utter insignificance. That’s the “hit on” thing. The “groped my father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate’s wife” thing is… well, don’t make a drinking game out of drinking a shot every time you think of a reason that’s obviously a fabrication.

>I’ve been in the same room as an alpha male a time or two in my days, and my experience with them is that they flirt with women as easily as they breathe–and that women are almost universally receptive to it.

That is true. But there’s something else going on, too. I think sometimes alpha behavior in general (and mine in particular) may be interpreted as “flirting” even when the alpha’s genitals aren’t involved. It’s a matter of intensity and attention.

When I pay attention to someone I often engage totally, with my whole mind and intention on the communication. Most people do that much less often than me; they’re too distracted by the drunken-monkey chatter in their heads. But one of the few contexts that will reliably elicit near-total attention from a human primate is…trying to mate.

I think sometimes women get the kind of intensity from me that they’ve learned to associate only with men hitting on them, and not unreasonably jump to the conclusion that I’m doing that too. If I were what Jeff calls “subdominant” this kind of false triggering would give me a huge reputation as a creep. But, as he points out, the rules are different for high-SMV alphas. Rarely, the woman may be repulsed. More likely, her mating script takes over.

I only figured this out recently. It could explain a few curious incidents in my past – once or twice I’ve ended up in sexual situations I didn’t want to be in without a clear idea how it actually happened (and remember, I don’t drink). Because, well, if her mating script takes over, mine might follow.

It probably works the other way, too; that is, non-alphas are trained not to fully engage women by the creeper-card reaction they’re more likely to get if they do. And then, women complain that men don’t listen.

@Jay Maynard: “So I’m forced to conclude you’re making this up. Standard SJW tactic, especially when one attacks the basis of SJWism.”
Except that one of your compatriots has linked to the post in question now, so anyone who cares to can easily verify that I /didn’t/ make it up, & that I was telling the truth about it being a direct C&P of that person’s comment.
Now would be the right time to apologise to me for calling me a liar.

“Next, I expect someone to try to paint me as a sexual abuser for coming to Eric’s defense. To anyone who knows me, this would be quite laughable.”
Indeed, as everyone who knows you knows that you have zero interest in women.

I think she means SHE couldn’t get a date until 25, something she finds quite unfair. (wait, isn’t the SJWs who say you aren’t entitled to sex or a date? Oh, right, that only applies to men,)

The comments on the post are quite telling: “And it felt creepy and uncomfortable watching him walk around a party.” I’d think they forget to put an accusation of misconduct in there, except I know SJW rules — their reaction is proof of the crime in itself.

@Jay Maynard: “Nop, you are correct. You did not make that up. I apologize for saying you did.”
Thank you, I appreciate that.

>>”Indeed, as everyone who knows you knows that you have zero interest in women.”
>This is untrue. There are women I would very much enjoy sharing a bed with. They know who they are, and t’s nobody else’s damned business…a gentleman does not kiss and tell.

Gee, a woman whines about men below a post which actually compliments Shanley Kane. That probably tells you everything you need to know about her dating history. Kane is far better looking than Elaine and I’d date Kane precisely never. “Fun at parties” is a phrase these women should think about, because men surely do.

Nico Kadel-Garcia:
> My wife (who has more technology degrees than me!) pointd out this discusseion to me,

So right off you start out on the wrong foot, and display your bonefides. No, not the sloppy typing, but the suggestion that degrees mean anything outside of Academia, government and large bureaucratic organizations.

And leftists. Leftists seem inordinately fond of government approved credentials.

> This blog post… isn’t even funny.

No, it’s not fun. Or funny.

It’s a deadly serious problem, both for individuals and for society.

We are at a point where the technology that keeps our society alive, in some places literally, is so complicated and has so many moving parts that we simply can’t afford not to keep competent people in competent places, and we can’t *force* them to be there and to be productive, they have to want to be.

> already shut down. It smacks of the accusations made against political rights groups
> that I’ve been hearing for over 35 years. I have no doubt the suffragettes encountered
> similar tarbaby-like acusations.

> In that 40 years time I’ve seen so many *actual* cases of harassment by men in power

Have you? How many times have you gone to HR about it?

> that sullying the waters with a poorly grounded and unverifiable claim of entrapment
> is poisoning the waters and discrediting the women who really are harassed and

No one is denying that women get harassed by men. Hell, my wife came near to smacking (and by “near” I mean she swung a backhand at him and missed) hispanic man who made kissy noises at her as she walked past.

We also don’t deny that there are men out there who *literally* have no idea how to behave around women. Or that when folks get to pouring judgement juice down their throats that mis-understandings can happen.

But it’s these things that give the SJWs power. We (most men) want women to be treated fairly, but fairly doesn’t mean that one sex gets to decide what’s fair and how people should act in the workplace.

> willing to report it. It’s disingenuous, especially considering some of the alternative
> reasons your “anonymous source” might have to make such a claim:

@ Dgarsys
Actually the data about ideologies in political science would suggest this isn’t true.
I have seen again and again in various aspects of political science data that says that 10% of people make 80%+ of the noise. With respect, I think you are being biased by the fact that so many “SJW”s are attention seeking–by definition.

Lookup studies on rebel movements for comparison. Only 10% are truly ideologically motivated

Troutwaxer:
> Let me illustrate with an example: You go to a tech conference and hear a slightly
> overweight, (10-15 pounds) but otherwise good-looking woman say, “I filed a complaint
> with HR because I’m stuck in a room full of Dew-guzzling brogrammers who alternately
> stare at my tits and give me “suggestions” for losing weight. The final straw was when
> I just got an anonymous dick-pic in my work email.”

A counter example:
1) They did look at her tits. Because they’re men AND WE DO THAT. Doesn’t mean anything other than they’re tits and we notice them. Women have different ideas about what “professional” attire means. When men are given the choice of how to dress they wind up in shorts or jeans and t-shirts or hoodies. When women aren’t held to professional standards (and even when they are) they wind up in clothing that that really does seem to be intended to attract the male gaze.

Every man in the office will look at her tits at least twice a day when she wears that. They’ll note what color her bra is. They’ll notice the skirt is a *little* too tight and her muffin top because the shirt is a little too sheer.

You dress in a properly fitting t-shirt (crew neck, not v-neck) and jeans that don’t need a shoe-horn to get on, and the male gaze won’t linger as much.

Of course, if businesses really wanted to fix this problem they’d develop sex-neutral dress codes, but then women would complain because SEXISM or something.

2) I’ve met damn few women who didn’t occasionally complain about wanting to lose weight. I’ve met damn few geeks who don’t want to solve problems. You mention a problem to a geek, he’s going to give you a solution. For us IT REALLY IS ABOUT THE NAIL. ( if you don’t know what I’m taking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg ). For women it ISN’T.

So what we have here is the traditional “Mars Venus” problem. And yes, I think this is the root of *most* sexual harassment claims (not all, and not the worst of them). There are a very small number of predators out there, a large number of men (especially in IT) who have no clue how to behave around women.

There are also a lot of women who expect men to behave like women. We generally don’t. Our brains are different, we generally approach the world differently and we communicate very differently.

TriggerFinger:
> And the final straw? Your hypothetical complainer with her hypothetical anonymous
> dick-pic clearly doesn’t know anything about technology if she thinks that the email can
> actually be anonymous. THAT she is justified about complaining about, but I’d bet she
> sent it to herself.

One of the companies my wife worked a fired their lead programmer for sending porn to at least one of his female co-workers. He was a bit deranged and really had no idea how to behave around women. He *really* thought it would get him a date.

>One of the companies my wife worked a fired their lead programmer for sending porn to at least one of his female co-workers. He was a bit deranged and really had no idea how to behave around women. He *really* thought it would get him a date.

Wait. That guy wan’t going to use an anonymous remailer. For his purposes he wanted the women to know where the porn came from.

I’m with TriggerFinger on this – I thought some scenarios through when he first posted. Yes, anonymous remailers do exist but the odds of a woman getting a dick pic through one seem really low to me. I’ve never sent one myself, but the only reason I could even imagine doing it is if I thought it would make the recipient want sex with me. Not going to happen if she has no clue who I am!

Or, I might be too rational to model the thought processes of dick-pic senders. I dunno.

> Lewinsky was classic, real sexual harassment of exactly the type that most workers in
> the US have to attend “training” about every year.

There were sources at the time that indicated that (a) Lewinsky had a track record of romances with married men and said “I’m going to the White House to get my presidential kneepads.” to one of their wives.

So while I do think Clinton was a moral scumbag and a sexual predator (Flowers, Jones, Broaddrick), I think that in Lewinsky he found a willing and eager associate.

> If my boss had done that to any of my female peers, he would rightfully have been fired
> and likely imprisoned.

Nah, that sort of thing happens all the time. There are just some folks whose self control is weaker than their drives.

First, the guy who did it was fired. Appropriate response to personal misbehavior. Second, it was “porn”, not a dick-pic. (Granted, not all that different). Third, if he thinks that behavior would get him a date, it can’t be sent anonymously. Fourth, I don’t deny that that sort of bullshit happens *ever*, but it has never happened in my experience to anyone I know, nor has anyone I know mentioned it happening in any context outside of “I saw this story on the news”.

Now, back to the hypothetical dick-pic: if you sent it anonymously, how does she know one of her coworkers sent it? Could easily be random spam, and if it is anonymous, it’s not going to be getting anyone a date. If it’s a true dick-pic (ie, a selfie) then the list of suspects can be narrowed down considerably from that. While it’s true that there are online anonymity systems that work reasonably well (against anyone who doesn’t have the resources of the NSA at least), when you start with a narrow list of suspects (the dew-drinking brogrammers) and set out to try to narrow it down to one of them, AND throw in a company’s HR investigation into it, I doubt anonymity could be successfully preserved even if one of those services was used. And I wouldn’t bet on someone stupid enough to send a dick-pic to a coworker would be smart enough to use an anonymizer, as your example itself demonstrates.

This mad-libs accusation from Elaine Ashton, whoever she is, got me to wondering about something I’ve never thought about before. Namely; why does groping in places like parties ever happen?

I groped a woman once. After a date, in her dorm room. It was a dumb adolescent mistake that I’ve never repeated, but at least it sort of made sense in context. We were in private, bed nearby, I was trying to begin or continue the mating dance. Didn’t work, but no permanent harm was done. We didn’t date again.

What is motivating a man who gropes a woman at a party? I mean, they probably can’t have sex there. Has he got some idea that she’s going to swoon in lust and follow him home? Does this actually happen? If it doesn’t, what’s the actual reward here?

I think this might be one of those things I don’t grasp because I don’t drink.

>The chance to touch a breast that they may never get to touch otherwise?

I like breasts just fine. They feel nice. But – and maybe it’s just me – I basically don’t see the point if touching a breast isn’t foreplay that is rather likely to lead to sex. (I’ll make an exception here for adolescent boys who aren’t used to touching breasts yet. Curiosity about them is more than reasonable.)

Is there some larger thing I’m missing here? Am I different from other men in some significant way?

You’ve never seen two unattractive drunk people dry-humping in a quiet corner at a party?

You’re lucky that way.

I’m not much of a partier, and I’ve seen enough successful hooking up at parties to know its viable. (There’s always an empty bedroom or the like somewhere, or you adjourn down the hall at a dorm party, or leave and catch a cab, etc etc)

@esr: I think the truth is a bit more subtle than that. I think it pretty much amounts to an instinctive mating behavior that is normally inhibited by social conditioning. Some groping is consensual or at least not objected to and sometimes leads to further sexual activity; I would class this as a sexual escalation tactic that moves an interaction from ambiguous to openly sexual and, in your terminology, fires off the mating script for the female if she is willing. Some groping is non-consensual (usually expressed after the fact, I suspect) and usually leads to reduced or eliminated chances of sexual activity with that partner and anyone else in the immediate vicinity.

So, going to a party and randomly groping people is not likely to lead to hookups — but most hookups probably can trace the steps leading up to the hookup to one that includes groping or what sex-ed teachers used to call “heavy petting”… and I suspect that the reason for this is that the activity works, *when not immediately rejected*, and that the people who do not get immediately rejected when trying this have prepared the ground ahead of time, so to speak.

> but most hookups probably can trace the steps leading up to the hookup to one that includes groping

Sure. It’s starting with a grope, in public, that confuses me. The version of the mating dance I learned starts with kissing, with mutual groping happening after both parties are already committed to an interaction that is explicitly sexual. Kissing may be public, but groping is generally postponed until privacy has been achieved and is immediately prefatory to stripping for action.

What you are suggesting is that some men consider groping functionally equivalent to a first kiss, and correctly expect that some women will respond to it that way. Which, again, strikes me as weird, but maybe I don’t get out enough. Or drunk enough.

(1) A long way down the natural progression of foreplay (or mating ritual if you prefer that term), and

(2) Doing it wrong.

It’s something teenage boys are prone to do because they don’t know any better and are trying to fake knowing what they’re doing. It’s embarrassing to see anyone over 20 do.

My own experience is damn near 100% that if a woman is attracted to a man SHE will initiate physical contact, usually innocuously (touching the forearm or playful finger to the chest or etc.) From there the tit-for-tat progression of the mating ritual should be natural. (Of course “subdominant” guys who don’t get much interest from women haven’t a clue how the game is supposed to be played. ))

No, or at least it’s consistent with mine. A very confident man may initiate by touch a women in a way that is ambiguously sexual, inviting her to either back off or escalate, but the mating dance doesn’t really begin until she touches him.

I take it you never went to Disclave before it got blackballed from the more reputable DC hotels, and got shut down permanently in 1997. They were notorious for their…. “parties”, and wound up closing back in 1997, the year after some fool handcuffed a woman to a sprinkler at a convention party. Adventures in plumbing ensued, and no hotel wanted them again without a very, *very* large security deposit.

@esr: I think starting with a grope is usually caused by artificially lowered inhibitions of the groper and is only successful when the inhibitions of the gropee have also been artificially lowered. I suspect that some men do consider groping to be functionally similar to a first kiss and that some women react to it that way when already positively inclined towards the groper. I suspect those who do it in public are too drunk to consider anything at the time, and would probably start with a kiss if they were capable of considering their surroundings with more clarity.

I also suspect there’s more inherent ambiguity to a certain type of “grope” than a kiss. A kiss is pretty explicitly sexual. A “grope” could describe anything from deliberate and undeniable contact with erogenous zones to accidentally brushing against someone. A successful “grope” approach would actually include multiple ambiguous contacts with various areas, judging the reaction to each, and escalating when the reactions are positive.

But the only time I would expect to see the crude “just grab ’em” grope occur is when one party is too drunk to stop the impulsive act and the only time I would expect to … err… not see but infer that it was successful is when the other party is drunk enough to stop the impulsive response.

(note: for purposes of this discussion, I am NOT using groping with the suggested definition “doing it wrong”)

The advice that I’ve seen is that if you’re going to ‘initiate’ by touching, you want it to be both confident and clearly _non_-sexual. If there’s any goal to such a gesture, it is to activate the mammalian affiliation and grooming scripts well before the “mating dance” enters the picture – in effect, you’re looking for a way of honestly conveying: “I’m not hostile or hopelessly low status” in a way that her System 1 will hopefully grok.

TriggerFinger, in a descriptive context like this, it makes no sense to use “grope” other than for clearly sexualized contact. Accidental brushing that does not even involve erogenous ones is not “groping”, although it may definitely start a “mating dance” escalation that does transition into groping. There’s nothing at all that’s mysterious here – we’re talking about basic behavioral cues that are strongly conserved in mammalian lines and are routinely expressed in _affiliative_ contexts that have nothing to do with mating or sex. As any pussy whisperer could tell you.

@ Triggerfinger: Yeah, and my mom would totally beat up your dad. Totally. With one breast tied behind her back or removed entirely.

Not my point. I’m not particularly fond of either point of view, though I agree with Eric’s motives, but I can tell the difference between an argument made from a high level of sophistication and an argument made from a low amount of sophistication. So I’m not advocating for a side, but engaging in odds-making and showing my work.

…. and your idea of an intelligent map of reality consists of structural oppression and rape culture?

Yes and no.

Keep in mind that I agree with Eric’s motives BUT I’m looking for a more sophisticated model of the stuff he’s trying to talk about. The simple fact is that third wave feminism is a pretty much nuts. But they live right next door to second wave feminism, which has a fairly intelligent model of reality, so they can go to the neighbors and borrow a cup of sanity any time it pleases them. And that’s my point.

I’m not really concerned, in this discussion, about whether “structural oppression” and “rape culture” are sane. (Both “structural oppression” and “rape culture” are filters one can use to look at reality. Sometimes they’re the right (sane) filter, and sometimes they’re the wrong (insane) filter. This gets really complex and I’m not going to address it here.)

However, “structural oppression” and “rape culture” are sophisticated arguments grounded in a complex worldview and in a well-moderated argument they’ve got substantial advantages over “Ebil SJWs are trying to destroy the Open Source movement.” From an odds-making POV, Eric’s arguments are well-known and there are obvious counters, while “structural oppression” and “rape culture” have considerable heft and are devastating when used properly.

I’m not saying that Eric is wrong. I’m saying that he’s at a massive rhetorical disadvantage.

@ James May: The deeper into women’s studies one goes the crazier one gets, so Troutwaxer’s comment makes little sense. When you get to the part where proper pronouns like Zir and Zhe or whatever the hell they are can undo the fiction of reproductive heterosexuality you’ve descended into the 36th Chamber of Idiocy.

Somewhat agreed. As I said, I’m essentially a second wave feminist (as is Eric) and the third wave of feminism is in pretty bad shape sanity-wise. I have a half-serious theory about this: Back in the mid/late-sixties, when it became de-rigeur for colleges to develop a Women’s Studies department, the male-chauvinists who ran Universities at the time sought out the least-sane feminists they could possibly find to run those departments… the women who were very rigid/brittle, or had bad issues with sex, or who were a little paranoid… whatever form the insanity took, and promoted those feminists over the ones who are actually sane, thus making them the gate-keepers of feminism.

Unfortunately, in doing so, they gave the lunatics the keys to the asylum. And here we are!

Dgarsys on 2015-11-07 at 12:09:08 said:
>: you haven’t made it as a SJW critic until you are accused of enjoying torturing small animals and being a physical threat to children in your extended family.

// Larry Correia is almost at that point.

Besides. As salon and gawker have declared in their defense of Sarah Butts and others – being a pedo is simply to be misunderstood, and another victim class //

No, their insinuation was more along the lines that I like to burn kids with cigarettes or lock them in boxes with spiders.

There is no bottom to the SJW barrel to scrape. Nothing is too vile for them when it comes unbelievers.

@Troutwaxer: “From an odds-making POV, Eric’s arguments are well-known and there are obvious counters, while “structural oppression” and “rape culture” have considerable heft and are devastating when used properly.”

… with the minor flaw that in modern Western civilization they have absolutely no connection with reality.

@Troutwaxer: “I’m not saying that Eric is wrong. I’m saying that he’s at a massive rhetorical disadvantage.”

… only in front of an audience of people who already believe in rape culture and structural oppression. Since you are one of them (see the second part of your comment) obviously those arguments work on you. To people who have already examined and rejected them as having no connection to reality, they are not just unconvincing, they are signifiers that the person using them has a minimal connection to reality to begin with.

It really is amusing how “Women’s studies departments at universities are run by the people who escaped from the insane asylum” is somehow the fault of the Patriarchy.

“while “structural oppression” and “rape culture” have considerable heft and are devastating when used properly.”

“Properly” here means “in front of an audience sufficiently idiotic, nuts, or indoctrinated (and no, those are far from mutually exclusive) to accept the idea that those arguments aren’t made up of distilled essence of bullshit”.

Where your premise fails is in its slavish devotion to complexity and sophistication instead of truth. The truth is often simple and stares anyone willing to look straight in the face.

@ Nop: ESR likes to imagine that he’s Torvalds’ peer, & of equal importance to the world of FOSS. Very few other people think this, obviously.

Sorry Nop. I argue with Eric’s politics all the time, but he’s one of the really important people in the FOSS world. Deal.

@ Eric: So, for example, the U.S. has a tradition of successfully managing ethnic diversity via linguistic uniformity and long-term mutual assimilation. There are people who think the latter two are dispensable. I think they are dangerous fools, ignorant of history, who have no idea what they’re messing with.

Agreed completely. I’m a melting-pot man, and I’m the descendant of people who happily melted… The melting-pot has great curry!

Or, I might be too rational to model the thought processes of dick-pic senders. I dunno.

I don’t get it either. I wrote the original “is it harassment” case with some deliberation, making sure that it would push a button or two. It’s been fun reading the replies!

OK, so are you actually saying that gropes can lead to hookups? If so, then that’s my answer. Men do believe that groping a woman can get them laid, and the belief is justified.

Only if the woman is either poorly-socialized or drunk enough to respond to a non-standard mating strategy. And this creates problems for other women down the line, because men generalize and decide that groping is the generally successful mating strategy, when in fact it only works with a minority of women.

Of course, it gets more complicated than that. If you want to mate successfully, you must grope* at a particular time in the sequence of events which leads to mating. If you grope too early the woman will be unhappy – she’s not ready yet. If you don’t grope, however, you don’t move on to the next step.

* “Groping” is probably the wrong word here. The male who is mating must engage in progressively more intense stimulation of the female breasts and buttocks, but only at the right time and in the right sequence… Obviously this is a generalization and the correct “sequence” will vary from woman to woman and culture to culture.

@ Jay Maynad: … only in front of an audience of people who already believe in rape culture and structural oppression. Since you are one of them (see the second part of your comment) obviously those arguments work on you. To people who have already examined and rejected them as having no connection to reality, they are not just unconvincing, they are signifiers that the person using them has a minimal connection to reality to begin with.

This is why I say well-moderated, and this comes down to definitions. I don’t want to dive too deeply into this, but let’s imagine a person who is black. Said black person may experience prejudice, right? Now imagine a different person who is handicapped. This person might also experience prejudice. Now imagine a third party who is a Lesbian. She might experience prejudice due to her homosexuality.

All of this is obvious, right? We know that Lesbians, blacks, and handicapped people sometimes have real problems with prejudice, so this is pretty much inarguable.

Now imagine a single person who is black, handicapped, and Lesbian. Conceivably she might face prejudice on account of being black, OR on account of being handicapped, OR on account of being homosexual. Or she might face prejudice on account of being black AND on account of being handicapped AND on account of being homosexual.

That combination of multiple kinds of prejudice is “intersectionality.” Once I define it, (and presuming that I don’t let you redefine it, which is crucial) it’s very difficult to argue that it might exist, or that it might be a useful term. Intersectionality does exist, and once it is properly defined it can’t be argued with effectively. You might argue that a particular person didn’t experience it, or that finding a black, handicapped Lesbian is unlikely (pro tip: run the numbers) but you can’t argue the concept out of existence as long as you aren’t allowed to redefine it.

(Redefining the other person’s term of art is unfair. Would you let an SJW redefine the meaning of a word like “database” or “fence-post error?”)

Given a well-moderated debate (much less a free-for-all of the type current news-mongering practice is likely to encourage) Eric can’t win, because a good moderator understands that feminist scholarship has “terms of art” which Eric isn’t allowed to redefine, just like programming has terms of art which an SJW is not allowed to redefine.

I’m giving you strategic gold here. Don’t throw it away just because you don’t like the messenger.

Where your premise fails is in its slavish devotion to complexity and sophistication instead of truth. The truth is often simple and stares anyone willing to look straight in the face.

Agreed, but we’re talking about strategies for fighting people who have a sophisticated ideology and don’t care much about the truth, right?

Jay, I’m just sitting on the sidelines trying to give some useful commentary. From my point of view the idea of a false rape or harassment claim is vile. So is Eric’s tendency to throw out the “possibly real injustice” baby with the bathwater. Both strategies lead to bad outcomes for everyone, right? As a computer/network guy, my sympathies in this fight kinda-sorta lie with Eric, but my moral judgement is something like “Let both these asses be set to grinding corn.”

See my response to Jay above. A big part of the problem is that you believe your definitions of things like “rape culture” are the same as a feminist’s definition of the same term. They’re not. This lack of sophistication is why you will lose the argument out in the wider world. As I noted to Jay, the STEM side gets more of my sympathy than the SJW side, but dude, you gotta up your game if you want to win this battle!

“Given a well-moderated debate (much less a free-for-all of the type current news-mongering practice is likely to encourage) Eric can’t win, because a good moderator understands that feminist scholarship has “terms of art” which Eric isn’t allowed to redefine”

Of course. If you reason from premises made of distilled bullshit, you’ll get bullshit results.

And a debate where you can’t question the other side’s premises is not a debate at all.

The difference between feminist scholarship terms of art and software engineering terms of art is that the latter have measurable, testable correctness (does the program run?); the former cannot be distinguished from any other form of distilled bullshit.

@J.C. Salomon
That’s the obvious definition, but it’s not quite what it means to modern feminist types. The genuine, honest ones try to qualify it, and understand it is a very imperfect term for what it tries to describe. The nasty or stupid ones either take it at face value or use it as a baiting term without the required qualifiers, thus making it nearly impossible to debate in good faith.

From what I’ve seen, the insanity and dishonesty do not come with varying the definition I’ve given, but in temporarily redefining and trivializing rape so that more aspects of Western society can be accused of creating a “rape culture”.

Above, @Troutwaxer defines the term intersectionality but avoids defining rape culture because there is no definition of rape culture that is not immediately and obviously absurd. Others define rape culture in a useful, effective, and accurate way, but miss the full absurdity of the problem.

Rape culture can be defined as a culture in which the practice of rape is approved of or encouraged, as defined above.

Rape culture can also be defined within the feminist community as a culture which practices and encourages heterosexual sex (because heterosexual sex is always rape, because structural oppression and false consciousness negate any possible consent).

Understanding both aspects of the definition is necessary in order to understand just how crazy the people fully caught in this philosophical black hole are.

ESR: I have a different view of groping in public. Keep in mind sexual dynamics in group animals, where typically only the alpha(s) are allowed to mate with females. A low-status male who initiates mating behavior with a female in public gets put in his place.

Public groping is functionally a claim of status – ‘I can get away with publicly and unambiguously showing my sexual interest for you’. If a major violation of the pack dynamics, men will batter me and women shame me. For a minor violation, men will ridicule – ‘get a room!’ – and women will try to pull the girl away – ‘I really need to talk to you right now, Amanda, it’s important’.

Public groping makes sense, because it allows the woman to gauge not only her own interest in the man, but also how the -group- responds to his advances. It’s a way to crowdsource her judgement of the man. The information value of this sort of signalling depends on whether the crowd knows and cares about the people involved – some hundred years ago, a young woman would likely have her -father- present. But instincts haven’t necessarily caught up with these developments.

>Public groping makes sense, because it allows the woman to gauge not only her own interest in the man, but also how the -group- responds to his advances. It’s a way to crowdsource her judgement of the man.

Aha. Very interesting theory, and the sort of generative explanation I was looking for.

It suggests that if you plot incidence of public groping, it will peak among high betas. Lower-status males won’t generally dare try it, and alphas have less need to – they can start the conventional mating script with their status already established. Which might explain why I have trouble comprehending the motivation.

As an illustration of the above – consider what you have learned about someone hitting on you, if they are okay with having a picture of them sitting in your lap with their tongue down your throat uploaded on Facebook and tagged with name.

Also, it’s necessary context to understand why the scarequotes sensible thing to do, when a man hits on you at work, is to report it to your superiors rather than just telling him you’re not interested.

Troutwaxer: See my response to Jay above. A big part of the problem is that you believe your definitions of things like “rape culture” are the same as a feminist’s definition of the same term. They’re not. This lack of sophistication is why you will lose the argument out in the wider world.

My what a snide, belittling, dogma-versed bitch you are. You want to know what “rape culture” is? Nothing you want it to be. It is a class of rhetorical dirty trickery that Robert Lifton classified as thought terminating cliches –

– a loaded snarl phrase designed, not to engage dialogue and exchange of ideas, but to silence them and grind discourse to a shuddering halt.

This language loading is a classic Kafkatrap – to question the existance of “rape culture” is to be an enthusiastic, card carrying member of it. And guilty of all of the other criminality that festers in 3rd wave fembots’ emotional misandrist baggage. Its usage is exactly the same as bourgeoisie and speculator were under Mao – not only a termination of thought/discussion, but a black mark to brand those that disagree as ideological pariahs and enemies of the state.

I simply can’t respect anyone that considers this kind of idiot language to have any kind of intellectual validity. At all. It is a sign of a mind that is not firing on all cylinders, a mind that has cauterized the synapses it is told to in order to avoid questioning articles of faith. You want to know why SJWs are where they are? Because there is a critical mass of moderates like yourself that have trained themselves not to call bullshit bullshit on the spot. I do not blame SJWs for our mess – I blae YOU. Because YOU enabled it.

Those G+ posts give me middle school flashbacks. It’s a bunch of otherwise unpopular people who nevertheless think they are better than you, and they all are taking turns critiquing your looks, your personality, and exclaiming “ewwwww” to each other. F*** them.

I still think you’re wrong for having published this, but I side with you while telling you that, than ever siding with people like them.

Anonymous, I have no doubt that the dynamic you describe is at play _in strongly hierarchical or traditional social environments_. It is essentially the heterosexual counterpart of what ESR calls domination sex in the homosexual context. Modern BDSM could be described as an attempt to channel these same dominance/submission instincts into a form that’s clearly consensual and not so entangled with duress and degradation – and a remarkably successful one, if only to the extent that the the “tops” actually play by the new rules.

This is the grain of truth to be found in some feminist anti-assault campaigns: what’s often referred to as “teach men not to rape” is better described as “teach men that coercive behavior is unacceptable and should be actively opposed, even and especially when it comes from your close associates or from high-status folks in your social group.” Now, if only these folks practiced what they preach…

The condonement of rape in rape culture is best understood not as overt condonement, but effective condonement which arises out of several factors:

1) The high evidentiary standard required to officially recognize that rape has taken place

2) The personally humiliating examinations a woman must go through because of item 1

3) Because of items 1 and 2, women are often afraid to go to the cops with rape accusations, meaning rapes and sexual assaults are woefully underreported.

4) “Slut shaming” — in conservative communities, often a female who is sexually active outside a marriage is shamed and ostracized, irrespective of whether she consented to such activity, adding to her shame and humiliation

6) Because of items 1, 4, and 5, women who come forward with rape accusations are often disbelieved, especially if the rapist is well liked or respected

All these combine to create an environment where women’s claims of rape are not taken as seriously as they should be; and where rapists get away with it more often than they should.

So the theory goes, anyway. The SJW line is one of “insufficient vigilance = acceptance”. I’m not sure I buy it completely. I concede that there are problems with how we handle rape in the USA, but a) the extent of the problem, and therefore possible solutions (beyond “a Glock in every purse” championed by the likes of Eric) remain obscure and b) we *are* getting better.

The high evidentiary standard required to officially recognize that rape has taken place.

You mean, the standard to convict a particular person of this rape. There is no analog to a coroner’s verdict of homicide (separate from a criminal conviction) in rape cases.

If you want official recognition that a rape has taken place (he proposes modestly), criminalize consensual sex outside marriage, with being raped as an obvious affirmative defense. This defense being offered, charges will obviously not be brought against the woman—and voilà! you also have official recognition of the rape, with a much lower standard of proof.

Troutwaxer- ‘Once I define it, and presuming that I don’t let your redefine it, which is crucial‘

Make up your own definitions, argue by definition, by definition you win argument, yes.

If I was in college with an 80-95 IQ I’d be arguing this way too. Especially in college, around these triple-digit IQ elitists with their oppressively good study habits and houses full of books. I’d make general statements using terms I define, I’d hold my ground and ‘maintain state’ as the pickup artists say. I’d display all the proper hatreds. I’d be a loyal cog in the Democratic Party. I’d have no choice.

In the context of all this rational discourse regarding feminist memes such as rape culture, has anyone here actually had a civil and rational discussion with a Third Wave feminist, such that there was some hope of enlightenment or mutual understanding? If you have, please provide some insight to the rest of us.

My own view is that extreme SJW women are either psychotic memebots or desperately in need of relationship. If the latter, then this whole dynamic is a Catch 22. They need to get fucked, but you can’t oblige because if you’re wrong, then you get fucked.

My sister had a classmate with politically oriented goals, including being a White House intern. Her senior year of high school, this classmate was invited to Washington — I think for Girls Nation — and met then-President Clinton. According to my sister, the classmate’s verdict on Mr. Clinton was “he’s gorgeous!”

Clinton may have abused his position of power to get some strange, but it a) is not an impeachable offense and b) not only meets the legal standard of consent, but Clinton probably did not have to apply any coercive or pressure tactics at all to get Monica to wet his cigar.

Troutwaxer, gender pronoun theory comes from second wave gay feminism. The fact the race-based intersectionalist Third Wave is now completely fused with the second wave doesn’t change that distinction. It’s origins are Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin. It was Judith Butler who applied it to gender feminism around 1990. It was only later that Butler – for example in 2009 – said that is no feminism that is “not also anti-racism.” However there is absolutely none of that in her 1990 book Gender Trouble.

As for intersectionalism, it is not a question if it is possible to experience multiples vectors of oppression, but in how that idea is being used, to what purpose and by who. That is where simple research comes in. The people who originated that idea and who most push it to this day are routinely race-baiting anti-white ideologues. When Audre Lorde talks about the “gap of male ignorance,” that isn’t exactly hard science or pragmatism is it? It is group defamation and profiling. Intersectionality deserves the same scrutiny as plain racism does. In other words if there are no actual institutions or laws which are in play, intersectionalism doesn’t exist other than an anecdote and NOT systemically. Anti-white ideologue typically ignore the difference between an actual set of laws like Jim Crow and their absence, preferring to use terms like “power structures” but which have no definition and can predict nothing. Discrimination is a legal issue, not one of an unquantifiable number of individuals who may or may not exist. The Civil Rights and equal rights movements fought law; Third Wave Feminism fights “whiteness” and men/heterosexuality. It’s fake social science is a con game meant to mask sheer hatred.

As for “rape culture,” it is a myth used to defame men. It’s first use in print was in a 1974 book called Rape: the First Sourcebook for Women. That was published by the mad gay feminist Shulamith Firestone’s radical N. Y. collective. Firestone once wrote abolishing the taboo against incest seems like a good idea. The following year a colleague of many of these N. Y. gay feminists named Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will, a history of rape in the past and in America. In that book Brownmiller wrote that criminal rapists act as “shock troops” for all men to keep women in fear and in line. Of course the idea all men despise women and want to keep them in a state of fear is typical of the paranoia and irrational suspicions of men which define the gay feminist movement, and to this day. “Rape culture” is a demonization theory meant to smear and defame all men. There is nothing to it. Feminists simply ignore the difference between men who are criminals and those who are not.

> Rape culture can be defined as a culture in which the practice of rape is approved of or encouraged, as defined above.
>
> Rape culture can also be defined within the feminist community as a culture which practices and encourages heterosexual sex (because heterosexual sex is always rape, because structural oppression and false consciousness negate any possible consent).

My impression of the usual definition among feminists is not this, but rather a culture in which rape is objectively encouraged, in the same vein as Orwell’s pacifists-are-objectively-pro-fascist argument.

And, yes, just as Orwell’s argument was an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of thought, the rape culture argument is an attack on innocent-until-proven-guilty and due process. But if you’re going to argue against it, argue against what it is, not what you would like it to be.

I just had to reply to this disgusting vile comment, this proves that people who believe in game are just crytpo feminists.

“Jeff Read on 2015-11-06 at 12:05:21 said:
Okay, so what would be the SJW code of conduct? Only women are allowed to initiate flirting? Only non-balding handsome men are allowed to initiate flirting?

Basically, uh, yes.

Among orangutans there are two types of males: flanged and unflanged. Flanged males are the dominant males; they have the two big flaps on the sides of their face. They are the orangutan equivalent of Terry Crews in the Old Spice commercials. They don’t have to do anything to attract female attention; they let out a loud booming mating call and the females come to them. Unflanged males have no such luck; they either have to strike out on their own and form a new troop, at which time their flanges will grow (flanges are secondary sex characteristics which are suppressed in subdominant males since if a flanged male encounters another flanged male he will attack); or they can sneak up on an unsuspecting female and force her into coitus.

Now, back to humans: if a woman observes a subdominant, low-SMV male showing obvious sexual interest, her prehistoric ape brain kicks in and raises the “rape imminent” alarm signal. You can be subdominant or you can be horny, but you can’t be both. Men who are both are called “creeps”.

The feminist angle comes into play when you realize that given the strength advantage men have over women, women live much more fear-filled lives than do men because they are surrounded by people who could do them grievous harm.

(Sound like a feminist apologizing for females being neurotic Women can do damage to men as well mangina. Women can use weapons or incite proxy violence against men.)

That makes women inherently unequal to men, and in order for feminist goals of equality to be met, HAS to change. So creeps (again any horny, subdominant male) are dealt with much more harshly in the past because women have the right to not live in fear of them and thus not encounter them.

(WTF? am I misreading you? Are you saying women have a right not to live in fear of low status males? WTF? )

The ONLY solution is to either stop being subdominant (work out, work on your grooming, develop a swagger) or stop being horny (“stick to video games” as I’ve heard it put). If you are not top-ranked in terms of your SMV, any interaction with women that suggests sexual interest will put you at risk. And if you are approached by women, either your SMV is high or you are being targeted for financial or other exploitation.”

(You are offering bullshit game advice, working out is not going to help. Also like any scumbag feminist you are calling men who are victims of false accusations smelly, also developing a swagger will make you look like a cock. You are a hyper macho idiot, who has bought into game bullshitl)

Rape culture doesn’t have a definition. This is not an unfortunate accident, but by design, and integral to its function. It’s a piece of nebulous rhetoric, intentionally conflating things which are untrue but borderline defensible, with claims that are either ridiculous or meaningless (in the literal sense; not merely wrong, but entirely vacuous). In use by its proponents, it is constantly reinterpreted, depending on whether they want to demonstrate its existence, maximize its emotional impact or legitimize draconian measures that make a mockery of justice.

Aside from that, your advice is sound, if not well intended. Ideally, you would take it yourself first, rather than argue against what people to you -seem to imply-, in stark contradiction to what they actually said and anything a sane individual would ever assume.

For reference, see – Random832 on 2015-11-06 at 12:17:55 – and – Jay Maynard on 2015-11-06 at 09:51:23 – .

“> Rape culture can be defined as a culture in which the practice of rape is approved of or encouraged, as defined above.”

That is an easy one. Just go to India. After the brutal gang rape and murder of a student in a bus, I saw elderly women on TV squarely blaming the victim. To be more precise, in most of India, high caste men have a moral right to rape low caste women. Any low caste woman, any time.

Also nice places are Japan and Thailand where the subways have to reserve special carriages for women to protect them.

@Random832 I find it rather rich to suggest that Orwell was anti-freedom of speech and anti-thought. I read many of his writings every few years, and I have never come across anything that suggested that Orwell felt that curtailing speech or thought was justifiable. But that doesn’t mean he had to agree with all speech and all thought.

You are quite right in saying that he believed that anti-anti-Fascism was effectively pro-Fascist. He was, as evidence has increasingly shown us, absolutely correct in that view (though in more modern history, we’d be talking about the anti-anti-Communists – indeed, ESR spoke of this when he blogged about Gramscian damage). But in order for Orwell to have been anti-free speech or anti-thought you’d have to show that he espoused criminalizing that speech and/or those thoughts. Good luck with that.

> The idiot then claims that females get a rape alarm if a low status male hits on them. Instead of seeing women acting alarmed as a false threat narrative used to bully low status men, the gamester believes that the female distress is real.

These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. It can be true that many females have a genuine, generalized fear of low-ranking men, _and_ that this fear is used as a bogeyman to push misandrist narratives when doing so is politically convenient. Compare whites vs. the fear of criminal behavior from minority groups.

Most everyone on this board would agree with your assessment that that form of social acquiescence of rape is wrong and should be opposed. If feminists in the US really wanted to draw attention to this problem and make a dent in it, they had the perfect opportunity to do so with Bill Clinton and his violent rape of Juanita Broderick. When you take down one of your own, it sends a clear message that it really is about the crime and not the politics. That they instead gave him a pass gives lie to their rhetoric and reveals their true motives. Same is true for Ted Kennedy’s negligent homicide of Mary Jo Kopechne. It’s hard to take feminism seriously when the hypocrisy is so brazen.

@TomA
“Most everyone on this board would agree with your assessment that that form of social acquiescence of rape is wrong and should be opposed. ”

My point was that no one has a reason to fight a “rape culture” in the US. That might have been the case in the past (e.g., before, and after, the abolition of slavery). It is horrible that powerful men still can get away with it. But that has to do with the nature of power itself, only solved by reducing the power instilled in some individuals.

Wrt the Clinton case(s), the behavior of his political opponents has made it all but impossible to get a clear view of what has happened. Maybe we will eventually get a “Cosby moment” for Bill, maybe not. I will not hold my breath.

@Jeff Read: ‘and met then-President Clinton. According to my sister, the classmate’s verdict on Mr. Clinton was “he’s gorgeous!”’ … “but Clinton probably did not have to apply any coercive or pressure tactics at all to get Monica to wet his cigar.”

You don’t make it to a position as powerful as POTUS unless you have a hell of a lot of charm. I think a lot of men – especially the ones who bitch & moan about women in discussions like this one, or one MRA/MGTOW fora – don’t realise just how much more attractive charm is than looks to most women. Look at men like Spiro Agnew & Einstein, neither of whom were in any way good looking, yet had no shortage of women in their lives. No doubt these same guys will claim that that’s due to their money & power, rather than charm, but I’ve known many conventionally unattractive men in real life with nether money or power who’re equally popular with women. In my own life, I’ve consistently found that the times when I’ve been girl-poison have been when I’ve been I’ve been whiny & bitter, which tends to show, no matter how hard you try to conceal it.

Charm or not, feminists claim rape and harassment is all rooted in power imbalances, and there is no imbalance on the planet quite like POTUS vs. an intern. So if you take feminism at its word the way Fortune 500 HR departments do, Clinton was wrong on first principles. Any CEO or even middle manager caught in a similar situation would’ve been fired first and had questions asked later.